My Light
by Qwisse
Summary: Diamonds in your hands. Fireworks in the sky. Harmless moonshine on the skin. You have a whole night; celebrate, if you still can.
1. Diamonds

**Author's note:**

Game universe, set soon after Sonic Adventure 2. More info will be posted on my profile page.

Enjoy!

**Edit 23-06-2013:** Edited the chapters. Thanks to Lord Kelvin for pointing out a humble part of the typos present in this story!

**Disclaimer:** I don't own the characters and locales. SEGA does.

* * *

**Chapter 1: Diamonds.**

.w.

Central City was celebrating.

It wasn't every day that the planet was in danger of colliding with a falling space colony and then escaped its fate by mere seconds. The President, being a personification of generosity itself, let his country boil with pure excitement for three days.

Rouge the Bat appreciated the gesture just as much as school students and office workers did. She wasn't interested in spontaneous parades and fancy fireworks, though. While people's heads spun with glee and alcohol in city streets, she could stop by their homes peacefully and see if they had a present for her.

This time, her target was a rich building at the border of the business district and a local park, hidden in the trees so very few city noises and random glances would reach it. Three-storey, pearly white, obviously modern, but trying to look old-fashioned in a way that made the artist in Rouge cringe. She quickly repressed an urge to file a report about an aesthete's hurt feelings nevertheless; today, all those columns and gargoyles were going to help her find her way inside.

Clinging to a tree on the opposite end of an alley and using her scope, she watched several servants leave the building leisurely. It looked like someone was generous enough to give a day off for almost everyone at once, even those of the service staff who usually stayed for the night. Rouge nodded approvingly; she always appreciated it when people were eager to make it easier for her.

She left her hiding spot, glided above the alley, flew over the two-meter-tall wall on a zigzag trajectory, and found herself a place behind a column next to the second floor's window. Had there been people below with an urge to look up, they would have seen just a quick shadow, nearly indistinguishable in the midnight darkness. Her favorite dark purple stealth suit was hiding her identity from the lurkers.

Alarms and indoor cameras didn't have days off, sadly, but they were not to spoil a thief's mood today. From her sources Rouge knew that the alarms wouldn't be turned on until the chief maid was done with inspecting the rooms before the night. Before that, a thief's opponents were just cameras, two or three old ladies in the corridors, and security personnel in the room on the first floor. Piece of cake for someone with a bat's abilities and armed with a multi-functional treasure scope.

Rouge cringed, remembering her failure during the Prison Island operation; G.U.N. wasn't an opponent you could easily play with. Thankfully, a humble city manager couldn't afford protection of such level. No heavy battle machines or laser weapons, just your average security system. A walk in the park.

The window by her side opened: the old maid was refreshing the air in the rooms before the house went to sleep. Rouge waited for her footsteps to die down and peeked inside. In the corner of her eye she noted a strip of a glass break detector. It was inactive for now, but if she was late with her searching, passing it would be a problem.

Inactive was an infrared motion detector as well, but the camera in the room was flashing a warning red light. Activating her scope's filters, Rouge studied the camera's viewing angle from her safe spot. Most of the door and a part of the room were inside the view, while the window, the ceiling, and the top right side of the doorframe were left without attention. The servant lady was gracious enough to leave the door open, too, and for a bat the way alongside the ceiling was as comfortable as a red carpet.

The camera in the dimly lit corridor was installed with the same level of inaccuracy, so Rouge could float up next to an ugly chandelier without being detected. Her first problem was already looming in front of her anyway: to get past a door she needed, she would have to enter the camera's field of view this time.

Rouge possessed an info that the service staff members were not allowed to enter the house owner's study on the second floor. It didn't take having an IQ of 300 to guess the most delicious loot lay there. What really annoyed her was the fact that the only window in the room was walled up and observed by several cameras on the outside; for someone not equipped with a catapult and an army of robots of back-up, the door was the only way to get inside.

The door she needed was just next to the one she had just entered, but there was the camera.

She glided towards it and pressed into a wall next to it. Chopping the wires would leave her with too little time to operate, because a black screen would instantly attract security's attention. Rouge didn't possess the equipment needed to cut into the video feed and make a video loop – and even if she did, the process would take too much time. Not that she didn't have a solution, though. She licked her lips; the next part was going to be tricky.

Reaching for the compact backpack made of the same dark purple material, she took out a small plastic box with a lens. She placed it right above the camera, making sure fields of view matched, and took a photo.

There was a 'print' button next to a 'take a picture' one.

"C'mon," the bat girl whispered breathlessly. "Make it quick."

To her despair, it took full sixty seconds for the portable photo printer to produce a small photo card. The quality wasn't stellar, but Rouge wasn't about to place it on the wall in her bedroom anyway. With a piece of two-sided scotch tape and a bit of tinkering, she placed the picture in front of the camera, making sure enough light from the chandelier reached it. She had no idea how it looked on the security monitors; she hoped a decrease in quality wouldn't cause too much movement instantly.

Now invisible to the ones sitting on the first floor, she landed in front of the target door and studied the lock. The contraption was a no challenge for her picklock set, but before making an advance she stepped back and scanned the door fully with the scope. What she discovered made her frown: there was an opening detector on the inside part of it which would alert the whole building unless she used a contactless key to disable it, which she naturally didn't have.

Of course, there were no wires accessible from the passage.

She ran a quick calculation in her head. The scans showed the device didn't have any advanced circuitry to fry with an EMP. Making a hole in the mass of wood with a special agent's compact plasma knife seemed the second best option – unless there was an active heat detector installed inside as well, which would instantly react to a blade of heated plasma. What she had learned about the house so far told her this was more than likely.

Time was running thin, and Rouge didn't feel like taking such a risk.

A small flask guised as transparent nail polish container appeared from the backpack. The thief felt anxious for she hadn't yet tested this liquefier on goods made of oak. She prayed to all seven Chaos Emeralds and the Master one as she dripped several drops of substance on the door's surface.

Her grin became apparent under her suit's mask as a horrifying dark hole formed before her in a matter of seconds. She waited for the liquefied wood to stop dripping, and slipped inside, careful not to touch the remnants of the door. The evidence of the crime was more than plain obvious by now, so she couldn't hope for the whole escapade to remain unnoticed until the manager returned home.

The scope instantly warned her about the heat detector in the corner. She nodded contentedly; clad in her stealth suit made of material originally designed for fire proximity suits, she didn't have to worry about her body heat giving her presence out. In any case, she had made sure of that while flying over the outer wall, fit up with a similar heat detection system.

Next part was just too easy. Her faithful treasure scope gave her out the location of the only safe in the room: behind a heavy bookcase. So cheesy.

Rouge was in the process of making her way through the books when the gadget gave her another tip: there was a source of a weak reflected signal somewhere under the massive wooden table, below the floor level. The thief dropped her activity altogether and fell motionless for a moment.

If she was an apparently-not-so-dumb greedy manager, where would she hide her treasure?

Just a few minutes later the old maid went back down to close the windows on the second floor and noticed a glaring hole in the door of her employer's workroom. The security she immediately called up found a disabled heat sensor, a displaced table, an accurate hole in the floor tiles under it, and a smell of burned wood.

Of course, nothing was inside of the hole, and no one was in the room.

.w.

Rouge listened to alarms going off hysterically in the distance, giggling quietly in delight. She didn't go to the park after she was done with plucking the safe out of its nest, deciding that it would be the first place to be searched for the thief, so she found herself a safe spot on a roof several streets away. There, she could finally crack the safe open in peace and look what her today's treasure was.

The safe had a mechanical lock she had some experience with. Putting one of her sensitive ears closer to it, she began spinning the wheel until a series of barely audible clicks told her what the key combination was. This way, she could easily open it without damaging the contents.

A stack of paper in the lower section was of no value to her; a small black bag in the upper half was her target. Her fingers shook slightly upon undoing the tie, and her eyes went wide as she saw what was inside. Rouge tore the scope's mask off her head to have a better view of what lay on her palm.

Vivid city lights gleamed off a brilliant-shaped jewel. So her sources were correct after all, and the man possessed that twenty three carat deep blue diamond after all…

Had possessed. Now it was the biggest one yet in Rouge the Bat's humble collection.

Unless you counted in a Chaos Emerald she had been provided with during the ARK operation and lost during it. She frowned with annoyance; she'd have another chance to get it back.

Rouge took a moment to catch her breath before the last leap home and turned the brilliant in her fingers, admiring the color. She knew this one wasn't the biggest gemstone in the world – a visit to a certain floating island ensured her that; but a feeling of new treasure in her fingers coupled with adrenaline was all it took to make her day. Well, night, more likely.

All jewels in the world already belonged to her anyway. She just had to decide when to come and get the rest of them back.

As she was done with her admiration, she put her haul back into the safety of the bag, frowning momentarily. It looked like she had told the echidna Guardian something about being done with stealing jewels... Eh, it's not like you could trust everything a pretty agent told you. Anyway, it was a good move on her part, given that she was going to drop by later on, and having the Guardian lax and trusting would be a delicious bonus.

She didn't feel sorry for the today's treasure's previous owners, either; that couple, the manager and his dearest spouse, had relieved the federation's budget of too much money for anyone righteous to frown at her. Naturally, the blue diamond was the result of one of those schemes the public would gasp upon learning about.

The manager would think otherwise, of course, but only after the security informed him about the theft – and Rouge would be long gone by that time.

Collecting information about the house and preparing the munitions was a bit of homework, but she was proud of how she handled it.

Something made Rouge tense all of a sudden. Her sensitive ears hadn't picked a single sound, but the skin on her neck crawled as if there was someone else next to her on the roof. Trying to not make any sharp moves, she turned her head back to where she thought that someone could be.

The bag slowly slipped out of her fingers.

Floating gently in the air in front of her was a cluster of diamonds. Of different proportions, from speckle-like to fist-sized; all tear-shaped, partially transparent, partially radiating a noble white glow. In a heartbeat the batgirl realized the light wasn't a reflection; it came from within the gems itself, in a way light would emerge from a Chaos Emerald after someone with a pure heart would call upon its power.

Rouge had never been able to evoke that light…

Nothing she could net in a citizen's house, or maybe even G.U.N.'s most valuable stocks would possibly match this beauty. A thought about the Chaos Emeralds entered her mind and was rejected; the memory of those parrot-colored clumsy stones was just too awkward to bring up before the whiteness of pure brilliance.

It was a gift the heaven itself gave her.

Something on the back of her head gasped. Diamonds did not just fall from the sky and floated towards you, they always were safeguarded like any treasure would be, that was wrong, crazy, unnatural...

The diamonds still levitated before her eyes, waiting for her to make a decision patiently. She gulped, licked her lips that were instantly dry, and reached forward.


	2. Fireworks

**Chapter 2: Fireworks.**

.w.

The plane was arriving to Station Square within half an hour, according to Tails' chronometer watch. Might have been sooner, but he and his passenger – not without some pressure on the latter's part – had agreed to keep the speed low enough for someone not used to this type of traveling to feel reasonably comfortable.

"There will be a huge show on the main square, in front of Twinkle Park," Amy Rose was chirping nonchalantly. At the moment she occupied a more or less cozy spot on the Tornado 3's tail behind the pilot's seat. "With fireworks, dancing, and everything. We should see it long before approaching the station. Isn't it exciting?"

"Uh… yeah, sure," Tails said in response. He had to raise his own voice uncomfortably so the girl would hear him through the wind and the roar of the plane's engines.

"Oh! I think I can see something already. There, up ahead!"

"I don't think it's Station Square, it is still too far away for us to see it. Could it be just sunset?"

"Really? Oh. Maybe you are right."

It was indeed getting darker, and the sun was about to sink into the ocean on their left. The remote waters shone so brightly it was painful to look at them without blinking. Amy let her gaze slid down to the ground – a black-brown-green slipping by far below them. Nothing much interesting to look at.

She considered suggesting Tails to make a turn so they would fly just a bit above the water, but discarded the idea after some thought. The fox wouldn't like the concept of losing time and energy for sightseeing, and Amy herself couldn't bear the thought of entering the chilly oceanic breeze. Sitting on a plane's tail, exposed to all winds and odds of weather was weird enough to make the experience more extreme, and was beginning to feel sorry for Sonic who was condemned to using those means of traveling all the time.

Besides, they could miss the fireworks.

"Do you think there will be a crowd cheering us?" Amy revived the conversation.

"Um, not really. People might not know our role in the story, yet." He wanted to add something about Sonic still officially being a wanted criminal, but rejected the idea, fearing Amy's outburst of righteous indignation at a height of several hundreds meters.

"But we saved the planet! Last time we did it, everyone knew about it straight away."

"Look, it's a bit different case. It is hard to record everything that happens on a space colony, and, and I don't remember any journalists waiting for us on Eggman's launch site."

The latter was true. After a series of very awkward negotiations, the doctor allowed them to take the rocket they had hijacked from his base in the desert, and even use the launch site by the very same base to land. Tails dreaded some belated trap or a backstab attack awaiting them there, but the villain just disappeared into his fortress upon landing. Sonic fled in exactly the opposite direction, and the fox boy was not at all surprised to find out that the couple of treasure hunters could find their way home on their own as well.

He and Amy found themselves alone together in the desert, and he could think of nothing better than to offer her a lift. The offer was mostly a show of good manners; witnessing the girl somehow make it to a guarded top secret military base on an island in the middle of the ocean on her own, he had no doubts she could as well find her way to Station Square from Eggman's base. But she took his offer anyway.

"I hope it will be settled soon," Amy said.

Tails thought staying silent would be a good way to finish this conversation, but Amy carried on after a short pause. "Shadow's story, too. People have to know he has changed after all."

"There are a lot of blank spaces in his past," he said reasonably. "We don't even know why he decided to help us in the first place. Rouge might know, though… but it would be hard to make her share such information."

Amy bit her lip, appearing deep in thought. Then she said, "I saw how it happened."

"What happened?"

"Shadow… Look, I had to do something to help, right? You guys ran ahead with the Emerald, and I saw Shadow on the colony waiting for it to crash, and I thought, hey, I can try to talk to him and ask for help."

The fox turned his head, looking back at her in awe. In his book, the action matched showing up at Eggman's base and asking the doctor to stop trying to conquer the world – matched both in audacity and insanity. "What did you tell him?"

"About people being good, and not deserving to die… I said he should give them a chance. Now that I think of it, it sounded a bit silly, but he got all white in the face and ran off to catch up with Sonic and others."

They flied in silence for several moments. "He mentioned that Maria girl, you know, from Eggman's grandfather's video. I think she and Shadow were somehow connected, so it made him help us even despite the Professor's will."

"Amnesia," Tails said so quietly that Amy could barely hear his voice. "I'm not good at psychology, but if the Professor was honest and his granddaughter was killed, the trauma might have erased some fragments of Shadow's memory. And you turned out a trigger that made him remember the truth."

He looked at her again. "It looks like we all have to thank you."

Amy flushed. "It's nothing. We were all saving the Earth, after all."

The sun had already disappeared below the horizon, leaving a stripe of glowing orange to indicate that eternal battle for the light wasn't over yet. On their right, darkness of blue and violet shades was standing tall. And in front of them, unmistakably this time, were looming distant lights of Station Square.

They were almost home.

Amy suddenly remembered about one practical issue she hadn't thought of before. "Hey, Tails. Can your Tornado land in the city?"

"Sure. It can transform into the Cyclone, and it is capable of VTOL so it can land almost anywhere. Just make sure not to fall off during the transformation."

"Great! Hey, you know what? You can park the plane somewhere, go to the show, and then stay over at my place. You will go to your workshop tomorrow."

Tails shook his head. "Thanks for the offer, but no. I have… things to take care of tonight."

"What?!" Amy nearly stomped her foot in the air. "Can't it wait for just one day?"

"I don't think so. Remember how Eggman fired the Eclipse Cannon at the Moon the last night? Some of it evaporated and dissipated into space, but there is still plenty of huge rocks floating on the orbit. I was checking latest news on our way, and the atmospheric research services inform of several meteorite impacts already taking place. See, if a rock is big enough, it does not burn in the atmosphere and falls down on the surface, so it can be very dangerous… I want to keep getting fresh news to see if I can help."

He was about to tell her that now, with the ARK threat being taken care of, he wanted to study their new problem that would eventually affect everyone on the planet – partial destruction of the Moon; how meteorologists and astronomers all over the world sure had trouble being happy tonight as well; how said research services used space threat detection methods that weren't overly accurate, and had proved so many times; about his new Doppler weather radar he had constructed on the roof of his workshop and was eager to try…

But Amy interrupted his train of thought. "It's just unfair. Last time, there were no proper celebrations because all of Station Square lay in ruins, and now those meteorites. How comes you aren't depressed?"

Tails smiled, even thought she couldn't see it. "I've got a Chaos Emerald from the mayor later, remember? Besides, I'm fine just knowing I was of use."

…Downtown Station Square was overcrowded, so Tails headed towards less busy districts to drop Amy off. Looking down from the Tornado, she thought she could see people pointing at the plane in the already night sky; but maybe Tails was right, and the humans were not pointing because they knew who was aboard, but because they were too excited to let such sight pass unnoticed.

"Hold on tight, I'm going down!"

Amy did as was told, but still couldn't keep her balance properly when the Tornado started transforming. Instead of a graceful jump, there was an awkward stumble and several last meters of falling. She landed on her feet anyway, wobbling a little and flushing under the stares of passers-by who stopped to have a look at the pink hedgehog dropping from the sky.

The fox pilot waved her goodbye and steered his aircraft up and towards the Mystic Ruins. She waved back, smiled daringly at the spectators and headed to the liveliest part of the city. Maybe she would make her way inside Twinkle Park; normally, only cute couples could get in without payment, but Amy Rose on her own was sweet enough to make two cute persons.

If the worst came to the worst, she still had a hammer at her disposal.

She was making her way through the crowd, anticipating the moment when somebody would recognize her as Sonic's beloved sweetheart, the girl who helped in stopping doctor Eggman more than once, and start asking questions. But nobody seemed to care, so her mood began dropping against her will.

People saw a madman try to drop a space colony on the planet, and got scared. They saw the fall somehow stop, and were happy about it. It didn't feel like they really cared about how it might have happened. As Amy kept eavesdropping, she couldn't hear anyone pronouncing Sonic's name. For the last three days, the whole Federation was eagerly after her hero; now that the most dangerous part was over, the Federation didn't really wonder what the heck had happened there.

And Shadow. She hadn't realized that before, but now it was beginning to dawn on her that nobody on Earth seemed to know about Shadow the Hedgehog.

Steal the Emerald from the state museum? Sonic the Hedgehog. Escape from Prison Island? Him again. Damage the Moon? Eggman. Chaos Control the ARK? Two golden specks the observing satellite couldn't properly zoom in on. Could have been anyone, or anything.

The hedgehog girl stomped her foot. She still was slightly disgusted about Shadow being the pretender, being Sonic's negative image, starting the whole ordeal in the first place, but he most obviously didn't deserve to be forgotten.

For Chaos' sake, a hedgehog died today!

But the world still lived, as if nothing was wrong with it.

Somebody pushed her accidentally and apologized. Someone else gave her a glass full of hot chocolate, patted her on her palm, and disappeared before she could murmur her thanks.

Amy turned sharply, now wanting to avoid that stupid square. She found herself a bench on a street close to the City Hall; the chiming of the crowd was still heard, but in a more distant manner. Supping a little from her glass, she shuddered, suddenly realizing it was getting chilly.

Maybe it would have been a good idea to get up to her place first and get herself a warm jacket.

And maybe stay there for the night. It wasn't like she could get into Twinkle Park alone without money anyway.

She mused about Sonic leaving their team as soon as the rocket touched the ground. A thought about him avoiding her on purpose never entered her mind; of course her hero hurried to check if all was well with the world after it had left the state of panic, to make sure there were no more battle robots on the streets, to learn what was wrong with those meteorites as well, perhaps. A smile appeared on her face; she always knew how caring her idol was.

Amy knew Sonic had work to do tonight, just like Tails. But she would really appreciate some comfort here and now, too.

It was completely dark by now. And suddenly, it was quiet as well – as if the whole city held its breath.

Then, the fireworks exploded.

With her mouth agape, forgetting about the chocolate in her hands, Amy stared up in the sky. There, right above her head, enormous flowers were spreading their petals as if trying to embrace the whole city at once. People gasped in unison; while light from the Eclipse Cannon caused cries of terror and wailing of sirens, man-made symbol of triumph, the fireworks, induced unanimous cheers and music.

Another rocket was launched, coincidentally heading to that exact spot in the sky where the wounded Moon already was. The Moon exploded again, this time with blue, red, and purple stars.

The streets rose in applause. Like mesmerized, Amy watched burning sparkles left of the blinding outburst descend leisurely, making room for more fireworks to come. One of those seemed to be falling on her; she placed her glass next to a bench leg and reached forward, not thinking about the burns she could possibly get from this contact.

The spark indeed went down until it hovered right above Amy's palms, flashing in its last attempts to live. Blue. Lilac. Blue. Lilac. The girl giggled; she didn't feel hurt, only warmth and a bit of tickling. She raised her hands a bit, and her speckle of light danced up obediently.

With the last flash of blue, the spark finally dropped on her palm and went out. No soot was decorating Amy Rose's gloves; this fire butterfly lived and died, leaving no cocoon afterwards.

Another firework exploded, making everything cast a sharp shadow for a moment or two. Enveloped in a heavenly light, Amy Rose smiled dreamily. Her unwanted desire to mourn evaporated, like a shadow under the sun or the Moon under the ray oh energy. Green eyes were alit again, reflecting both her inner power and the illumination in the skies.

She stood up.

The world lived on. But one hedgehog died to pay for it, and her duty was to tell everyone about it. As well as restore Sonic the Hedgehog's good name.

Tomorrow. Right now, she had more fireworks to see.

Minutes later, only a glass almost full of cold chocolate could tell that she had ever been there.


	3. Prickle

**Chapter 3: Prickle.**

.w.

Sonic yawned, showing boredom with his every feature. "Any progress on the Moon problem, Tails?"

"Not much," the fox replied, feeding data from the radar on the roof to his workshop's supercomputer. "Several research groups are already calculating how a change in the Moon's mass is affecting the Earth's characteristics such as rotation speed, so their first estimations should be ready soon. By the way, the Earth's gravity field should have become slightly more powerful, among other things. Have you felt any different during your runs? I was not getting out much lately, and I still feel a bit funny after the ARK's gravity anomalies."

"I think so. A bit weird to run. Not that it's that much of a trouble."

"Good… I think the government is preparing something. There will be a meeting dedicated to the Moon incident tomorrow, and I will see if I can find out what's on their agenda. Not sure, but probably they will try to capture an asteroid and merge it with the rest of the Moon."

"Cool."

It was the fifth day after the ARK's fall had stopped, and the heroes could finally return to their everyday tasks. For one, Sonic was now righteously saving the world from an alien invasion. Spread on a couch with his legs on its back and his head hanging down, he was holding the gamepad high above his chest and pressing the buttons rapidly, killing green monsters on the TV screen at a breathtaking speed. All with the same emotionless expression.

"Um," Tails shifted on his chair in front of the computer uncomfortably. "So, what's about you being accused of stealing that Chaos Emerald? The police should have lifted all accusations off of you by now."

"Well, they sure know it wasn't me in the museum, but it looks like they don't really want to tell all the people about Shadow. Something to do with the G.U.N. being against the government on this one. So it's sorta stuck. Nobody chases me to arrest, but I get less fan letters now."

"Hey, I can try and dig for some information about Shadow in the archives. If we spread it, you will be–"

"Nah, it's fine. It's nice not to feel wanted sometimes, by the police or fans, whatever. And if the world is in another trouble, I'll be an hero again in a blink."

His younger brother stared at him, puzzled. Sonic's freedom was more important that that… right?

But then the data finished downloading, so it was time to get the analysis running. Between applying processing conditions, he briefly thought about asking Sonic to find several Moon fragments for him to study. That should be easy for a hedgehog traveling at supersonic speeds.

"So, what were you doing all these days? Talking to police?" Tails asked when there was a break in his work.

"Just a bit. Mostly running. So sweet to see the world at an arm's length, not from the space. No idea how those scientists could survive many years of living up there."

"Have you visited Amy?" Tails asked, unexpectedly even to himself.

"Nope. Why? She must be still moping about being of no help to us during… you know."

His two-tailed friend thought about what Amy had told him about her interaction with Shadow. "Yeah…"

There was a knock on the front door of the workshop. The fox kit looked at his watch; nine p.m. Not too late, given that Tails was used to going to bed around the morning hours, but a polite guest still could have picked an earlier time to drop by.

"Coming!" he shouted anyway, jumping off of his chair. Sonic got killed in the game, cursed, and tore his gaze away from the TV screen to give their visitor his full attention as well.

Meanwhile the door shook as if holding back a tornado. "Wait just a second– whoa!"

Tails gasped; he was facing a bobtail dog standing on its back legs. Or a short old man with extremely bushy brows. Peeking out of the living room, Sonic quirked one of his own. The stranger, dressed in an official-looking brown suit, maybe just a bit worn and untidy, didn't seem like fun.

"Good evening," Tails said politely. "Are you looking for–"

"I see nothing good about this evening," the man said harshly. "It has a night following, which is not good in our current circumstances."

He entered the workshop without permission and found himself a place next to the window. "Professor Pickle is the name. Do not worry, my dear colleague, I am not looking for an autograph from your speedy friend. I'm here with the sole purpose of talking to you."

Two friends exchanged glances. Participating in all those Dr. Eggman vs. the world rumbles, the fox prodigy sure had attracted the attention of some respectable scientists of the Federation; but this one visit sure stood out just a bit.

In the end, Sonic shrugged and rolled off the couch. "Hey, Tails," he said nonchalantly. "I'll be upstairs. Let me know if you two need me, 'kay?"

"O-okay..." Tails said in a weak voice.

He couldn't pretend he wasn't at all worried. Scientists tended to behave funnily in everyday life, but now that the boy could see through the appearance, the professor did not at all seem funny. He talked with the air of a man being on a tight schedule, with this talk to Tails being not the most pleasant event planned for today.

The kit wished he could see the professor's eyes under the brows.

Sonic went up the stairs to the second floor of the workshop where the bedrooms were, and Tails gulped. "Alright. You said you wanted to talk to me... Maybe you want some tea first?"

His sudden guest stayed silent for some time, probably drilling Tails with his eyes. It made the fox shift uncomfortably. Another bad thing was that the old man preferred to stand with his back against the wall rather than occupy a spare chair, so the host felt awkward to sit down now. He stood leaning on the console of his computer as a compromise.

And it was only then when Tails first noticed an opaque bag in the visitor's hands, with some oblong object lying in it.

When Pickle finally opened his mouth, he sounded bitter. "You have never heard of me, have you?"

"Sorry, but I don't think so."

"No surprise. No surprise," muttered the professor. "Sadly, I cannot vaunt of being on of the most eminent figures of modern science. My more effective colleagues consider my field of study nothing but an eccentric hobby. All they need now is weaponry, or robots, or sophisticated machines, or," his face contorted as if the following words were biting his tongue, "artificial life forms. I am sure you have heard of the latest incident involving a certain space colony."

"Yes," the fox said, feeling a small wave of courage. "In fact, I was aboard the ARK when–"

Pickle wasn't listening. His rant wasn't to be interrupted by anything. "Such a horrible event! The madman halved the moon with everyone on this planet watching. When I saw the broadcast, I hurried to warn the chief scientists about the consequences. Nobody listened to me, imagine that! People don't want to take some old temples seriously. Now it is too late, and all I can do at this point is share my knowledge with someone sympathetic. Maybe you still can persuade your friend to do something, but you know how intense the celebrations have become by now."

Tails felt as if after half an hour of listening to TV ads. His head span slightly. "I don't get it! Too late for what? What do you want Sonic to do?"

"Get to the core of the planet, of course. There should be a way to do so, otherwise there is no hope for us."

The kit stared at him, blinking. He still hoped his guest would start making sense at some point. A look of polite despair on his muzzle made Pickle snap his fingers angrily. "You should know that our planet's core is not a mere lump of molten metal. It has a soul of its own, a dark and menaceful soul with a hatred towards all forms of life. The fact that there are living beings on the Earth's surface is a result of a beautiful coincidence."

His fox colleague frowned, puzzled. That whole dark soul story sounded a bit like Chaos… but Chaos was long gone, right?

"How do you know all that, Professor?" he asked.

"Records, my friend. Records. Translation is a hard labor, but with its help we know how hostile the creature inside the core is. Those who witnessed its wrath later lost their minds, and often lives. If it ever breaks away again, even in a form of separate fragments, the chaos will break loose in our world."

The fox twitched upon Pickle mentioning chaos before he realized it was just a metaphor. Still, what the professor was telling him could sound like Eggman's next plan to dominate the world with the help of some ancient deity, only the one yet to be developed. Some other day, Tails would have been happy to get such information before the next round of their war broke out.

But there was one thing he couldn't understand. "Um… It's great, what you said about the planet. But why do you think we are in danger now? It is the Moon broken, not the Earth."

All of a sudden, Pickle seemed to have become several decades older. His shoulders sank down as if he was now ultimately fed up with what his life was throwing at him. "Danger? Nobody is in danger. Only our ancestors of thousands years ago were dancing on the dead bodies of their beloved ones last time Gaia set itself free. Now the Moon is broken, and people are celebrating all over the world. Funny coincidence, don't you think so? And speaking of funny, I cannot remember what I was doing last night, and the night before that. I might as well have been dancing on the streets of Spagonia with my students, which, you know, is unacceptable."

"P-professor…" Tails said, feeling more and more itchy about the whole occasion. Maybe he just had to call a doctor, or police, or at least Sonic to help him out, because the man now indeed looked like he could use some help.

Meanwhile, Pickle checked out the darkness beyond the window, sighed, and straightened up. "Actually, my presence here is not even needed. You can find all necessary details in my study, in the University of Spagonia. They have never been a secret, but people have never been interested in them, either. Sad, but true. I just want you to understand how serious our current predicament is."

The man reached into his bag he had been holding all this time, and took out a long white kitchen knife, a ceramic one with fancy flowers on the handle. He demonstrated it to a frozen Tails.

"My favorite knife," Pickle said conversationally. "I used to make cucumber sandwiches with it."

With those words, he slashed his throat with it.

Seconds later Sonic stormed down, following Tails' desperate cries. What he saw was his two-tailed friend, mortified beyond possible, pointing at the man lying motionlessly on the floor in a quickly spreading pool of blood. The professor's head was turned sideways, and with the way it was angled, the fox and the hedgehog could finally see Pickle's eyes.

They were normal blue eyes, only puffy red from the lack of sleep, and glassy from the lack of life.


	4. Present

**Chapter 4: Present.**

.w.

Rouge the Bat had a busy night.

Despite Shadow's apparent death from burning in the Earth's atmosphere, the President made it clear that her work on investigating the Project: Shadow incident was far from being over. From the strange request of the President of fifty years ago to Gerald Robotnik, to the experiments G.U.N. were performing on the Prison Island after Shadow and Gerald himself were evacuated there – Rouge's boss wanted her to get to the bottom of it all.

Searching the Federal archives was a piece of cake once she had got her authorization, but the G.U.N. were more tenacious about keeping their secrets secret, especially from sneaky government agents. By the way the whole story looked so far, Rouge could say that independent world-wide military organization had all the reasons to protect their image from a loud crash. Some other time, she might have even felt sympathetic, but her own fight for life against the Flying Dog robot on the Prison Island made her just enough prejudiced to keep going.

Tonight she attempted to break into the G.U.N.'s data network from outside the military facilities to see if she could get anything. To avoid compromising her own residence or any operational terminals the government could offer her, she preferred to use a computer in a third party organization she could get access to. In case of emergency, the organization would have to go through a very awkward talk with those guys in uniforms with a G letter on it, but the spy herself and her superiors would remain safe… for some time.

It did not look like the venture was a total success. Rouge indeed found a hole in the security system and could use it to break in; she made sure the documents she needed existed there, and even got hold of one of them with the lowest secrecy level. The problem was that she suspected her little visit hadn't gone unnoticed. She as well snatched a bunch of non-relevant files to make her intentions less evident, but the spy had no doubts that G.U.N.'s higher ups would figure out that the lurker was after the information about Shadow.

And reinforce their security instantly, of course. In this race, she had to combine planning out her next steps carefully with working really quick, before those guys decided to take drastic measures against any discreditable files and materials they currently had.

In the end, she got home at around seven A.M., sent her boss a quick report, and stretched on her bed. She was invited for a meeting that evening, so she planned to take a long nap before that to look refreshened and striking as always.

No wonder that when her pager started beeping half an hour later, she was less than happy to get up to check her inbox.

Every agent was provided with a one-way pager to be able to receive crucial messages from the command and the freshest intel in short time. Sometimes certain active missions required carrying a voice or video transmission communicator as well, but all the time the agents were demanded to have their pagers turned on to react immediately if other means of communicating failed due to emergency.

But this time the message was not from Rouge's boss.

Being a professional spy, Rouge was scrupulous in collecting all information she could possibly make use of. From leeching off non-encrypted police channels to checking the world news, everything was a part of it. She had personally set up a station and software that was scanning all available media non-stop, searching for provided keywords in both text and speech and sending the most interesting articles to her laptop. If by the number of keywords the program decided that certain news was urgent, it would send an e-mail that would eventually reach Rouge's pager.

It was pretty to be aware of so many possibilities the technology could offer.

Rubbing her eyes that were burning from the untimely wake-up, the bat rolled onto her stomach and read the text on a small screen. Since her current mission was tied to researching Shadow the Hedgehog's backstory, she decided it wouldn't hurt to watch Sonic the Hedgehog as well for a while. With him being tied to the ARK story so greatly, some interesting things could possibly come to light.

Only this time, the star of the scene was not Sonic himself, but Tails, his best friend. Rouge read the latest in the bunch of messages; the news. It appeared that some old man paid Tails a visit last night and got killed in the meantime. The journalist responsible for the article was delighted to remind the audience of the latest incident involving the state museum, a Chaos Emerald, and a certain thievish blue hedgehog.

The spy looked through the other messages. Police reports; official requests; only one news article. It looked like the matter wasn't a big bang in the society yet, but was getting close to becoming it.

Within the next seconds Rouge started her laptop, accessed the network, and logged into the Federal Crime Information Center where all crime-related information was uploaded to. She bit her lower lip in annoyance; official sources confirmed that the incident took place several hours ago, when she was still on her mission. Rouge was falling behind, but at least she already had all reports ready and waiting for her to explore them.

_"A. Pickle, male, 78. Former residence: Spagonia, Tylia. Worked in the University of Spagonia, History Department… Death from the slash wound in his throat, dealt with the knife found next to the body. Impossible to determine whether it was suicide or murder…"_

_"M. Prower did not attempt to escape or evade the interrogation, and looked overall stressed. From his words, Mr. Pickle arrived to his workshop at around nine in the evening, talked to Mr. Prower for about an hour, and then killed himself with a knife he had brought with him. All this time the man did not appear completely sane and kept talking about the end of the world and the like. See the attachment for the full interrogation record._

_Sonic the Hedgehog remained upstairs all this time and cannot verify the adequacy of Mr. Prower's words, but he claims his friend had no reasons to murder Mr. Pickle, not to mention Mr. Prower is unable to kill anyone in general. We will check this version, though; it is possible that there was a serious argument based on Mr. Pickle and Mr. Prower's scientific activities."_

_"No footprints other than those of the victim were found on the handle. Cannot serve a reliable proof anyway, given that Mr. Prower always wears gloves. Both he and Sonic the Hedgehog had drops of the victim's blood on their fur and clothes, but they claim they touched the body only to find out if they could help the victim."_

_"That Pickle didn't have a wife or kids, and honestly, looking at his photos, I don't think any woman would... He had a sister, though. She lives in Central City, United Federation, but in a phone conversation she said she had not heard from him for a while. It looks like he arrived from Spagonia without warning anyone about his trip, and went straight to Mr. Prower's home in Mystic Ruins. We'll be sending local people to talk to Pickle's sister anyway."_

After many hours of routine procedures, Miles Prower had been released without a charge, but with an advice not to leave the Mystic Ruins unless he was heading to the nearest city, Station Square, until the investigation was over. It was when the police sent the logs and reports to the FCIC.

Rouge drummed her fingers on the laptop's edge, thinking. This case in itself did not look like it could help her with her Project: Shadow task, so she could rightfully turn the laptop off and go back to sleep. Tails sure was in trouble now, but it wasn't her business to help him out.

On the other hand... When a scientist arrived to another country to meet with a famous hero's genius friend, talked about the end of the world, and then died under strange circumstances, the case sure looked like something worth investigating even without an official command to do so.

From the federal database she only learned that Pickle had never had problems with law during his life. Rouge looked through the attached interrogation log, but found little more details than there were in the accompanying note.

She opened another window and searched Pickle in the Internet. Surprisingly, there was a lot to look at; for a humble scientist living in some small and faraway country, the man sure had tried hard to let the world know about himself.

Rouge also searched through the reviews and responses written by other scientists famous in varying fields of study. From historians to physicists, they all agreed Pickle was a bit on the loony side and should probably take up writing paperback fantasy books. Looking up his articles about the planet's soul, Rouge couldn't agree less.

She wanted to feel relieved, but did not quite feel like it was over yet.

Finally, Rouge checked Pickle's sister's name. For some reason it seemed a bit familiar, as if Rouge had already come across it not long ago, but didn't find it significant enough to remember on purpose. She bothered to open her personal database to check if she had any information on that woman. When she found what she was looking for, she hmm'ed loudly.

Things surely were looking more and more interesting with every passing minute.

The bat girl sat on her bed, running her bare feet over the floor slowly. Something about the news was bothering her; most likely her spy intuition was whispering that there was more about Pickle's death that lay on the surface. Rouge remembered the monsters they encountered on the ARK, and then an even earlier case she hadn't happened to investigate. Something about an ancient god devastating Station Square… One will become sensitive to the supernatural stuff, living in a time that interesting.

Sonic's best friend lived near Station Square, too…

Had it been some other day, she would have immediately visited Spagonia to see if she could find more clues there. But there was the meeting she couldn't miss, so that trip had to wait.

Pickle's sister, on the other hand, was more accessible, coincidentally living in the same city with Rouge. The police reports did not imply she could have any specifics about her brother's activities, but the name got Rouge curious.

With a sigh, she jumped off the bed. The reports stated the police would be having a talk with Pickle's sister in person as well, so she probably had about an hour for her coffee and make-up.

.w.

It was little past nine in the morning when Rouge knocked on the door.

She made sure the police had left before she showed up on the front lawn. A small one-storey house in a quiet district was now dark and calm. Rouge's large ears twitched; it was the type of calm that indicated something bad had happened to those living inside.

An old lady opened the door. Svelte, with her back held very straight, she still appeared only slightly taller than Rouge herself. With her clothes being tidy and her hair well-combed, she could seem a regular happy housewife had the bat's sharp eye not noticed signs of a stressful, sleepless night which lady did all she could to hide, puffy eyes being one of them.

"Morning, my dear. How can I help you?" she said in a gentle voice.

"Victoria Lambert?" Rouge asked in return.

The woman paled a little. "Yes. It's about Alexander, isn't it? I have already talked to the police..."

Rouge was prepared for this one. "Cherish the Bat, private investigator," she said, taking a fake license out of a small handbag she brought with her. "My client who wouldn't want me to reveal his name hired me to investigate your brother's death. May I come in?"

Victoria let Rouge enter the house and closed the door behind her. The bat glanced around taking in little details of the interior, which didn't take long since there wasn't much to take in. The living room she found herself in was tidy, but didn't really give out the personality of the person inhabiting it. A couch, a table in the middle with several chairs around it, shelves with old books, bleak curtains on the window; no decorations, no souvenirs, nothing of those little things every person surrounds themselves with.

Had Rouge not known otherwise, she would have guessed the lady had moved here only a couple of days ago.

Meanwhile, Victoria was shaking her head slowly. "I have no idea who your employer might be. Alexander didn't have any acquaintances with enough money and power to hire a private investigator… At least not that I would know about them. Would you like some tea, perhaps?"

Rouge ignored the hint in the first phrase, appearing to protect her fictional employer's personal details. "Yes, thank you."

She watched Victoria wander off to the kitchen and return with two cups of black tea. The agent didn't feel like drinking, but she wanted the lady to feel a bit more relaxed, and tea could help that. Holding her cup with two hands, she watched Victoria sip a little. "Your brother was lecturing on history in the University of Spagonia, right?"

"Yes. He loved history, actually. It was his trouble that he preferred… _alternative_ versions to the official ones."

"Did you notice anything strange about him lately?"

"He has not contacted me for over half a year. I don't think that our last meeting was somehow unusual. I have already told the police it is unlikely that I can be of any help. Sorry."

Rouge already knew that, so she just nodded. She felt silent for a while, thinking of something the police wouldn't have guessed to ask.

"You didn't have quarrels, did you? I mean fall out to the point he started hiding details about his life from you."

"No, miss Bat–"

"It's Cherish," Rouge said quickly. There weren't many talking bats in Central City, and she had to make sure that false name lingered in Victoria's memory, just in case.

"–My dear Cherish. We lived in harmony as a family. It's just that we have lives of our own, separated by such great distances. Had lives, I mean."

Rouge went on. "It seems that Mr. Pickle's suicide is somehow connected to the latest events. Has he mentioned the ARK or doctor Eggman before?"

"No... but he used to talk about space a lot. The Earth, the Moon, other planets. He believed that our planet has a soul of its own. It must have sounded like heresy to other scientists, but when he started talking about it…" the lady smiled. "It was like listening to a fairy tale from the childhood."

The bat's ears drooped down a little. It looked like she actually would have to visit Spagonia as soon as possible… at best, the next day. Now she had to carefully turn the conversation towards Victoria herself.

"Mr. Pickle wasn't needy, was he? I don't think lecturers earn much in Spagonia."

"They don't, but Alexander never complained about his fee. It was acknowledgement that he missed, the feeling that he was virtually helping the mankind. I was sending him money sometimes, but he never asked for it."

"You were?" Rouge arched her eyebrow. "I don't want to appear mean, but you don't look like you can afford that. I know your husband died many years ago…"

Victoria smiled weakly. "I had a very good job. Living alone, I don't spend much, so I could indeed support my brother."

"You had..?"

"Until this week. I worked as a maid for a wealthy family. The house was robbed last week, and everyone who was on duty that day was fired. It happens sometimes, when an employer cannot find the guilty one and is displeased with everyone."

She looked at Rouge, and added, "Alexander did not know about it. I was planning to tell him later, after finding another job. I did not want him to worry for me."

"It will be hard to find another job if you were fired because of robbery, even if you weren't involved," Rouge said in a calm voice. "A vengeful employer can literally ruin your working record."

She thought about herself at this point. From a clumsy jewel thief to a high class government agent in a few years – that sounded like a breathtaking career... but Victoria was too old for it.

Not to mention she wasn't the one who had robbed her employer in the first place.

"I don't think he really wants the news about the robbery to spread," said Victoria. She hesitated a bit; her next words obviously weren't meant to reach a policeman's ears, but in her view, Cherish the Bat had little to do with police. "I have a feeling the stolen items did not rightfully belong to that man," she finally said. "And he wouldn't warn the police. If I knew that, I would have left the job myself long before the robbery. It just doesn't seem right for me to work for a corrupted man."

Rouge studied the woman closely. She could swear that Mrs. Lambert was well aware of all the trouble she would have to face looking for a new job. Maybe she had already gone through several rejections when her prospective employers saw how she couldn't explain why she was fired. The bat was impressed by how she still could smile, having to go through such humiliation, followed by her brother's death on top of everything.

"Do you at least know what was stolen from that house?" the agent finally asked.

"No. Security said the thieves took away the whole safe from my employer's study, but I have no idea what was inside."

"That's just natural," Rouge said. From her handbag she took out a pen with a piece of paper and started writing. A cup still full of tea she put aside. "Have you noticed anything unusual that night, by the way? Save for the theft, I mean. People living in this city say the sky, and everything seemed different."

Victoria was taken aback by that question. "No… I mean, I don't really know. They held me for questioning, so I got home only in the morning. But could the world have been the same that night? Everyone was celebrating after the planet was saved."

"You weren't. And not only you." Rouge finished writing and stood up. "That's all that I wanted to know, actually. Thank you for your help and tea… now I've got one last favor to ask of you."

Victoria got to her feet as well. "Of course. I would be glad to help you with your investigation."

"Good. Go to Spagonia, and find your brother's place. Make sure all his research materials stay there, even if the local agencies try to seize them. I will go there shortly, too, and I will need as much information as possible. It will be best if you go today."

The woman shook her head slowly. "I'm afraid it isn't possible. I just don't have enough money at the moment to buy the ticket…"

"Don't worry about it." Rouge tugged at a loose silver chain running around her neck, pulling a small shammy bag from under her clothes. She handed it to Victoria along with the piece of paper. "Here's the address. Go there and sell what is inside of the bag, and you will have enough money to buy a ticket. Just don't stay in Central City for too long after that."

"I don't understand…" Victoria stared at the self-proclaimed private investigator, blinking in confusion. "Why would you need to help me like this?"

"Let's just say I'll need your help later," Rouge said calmly. "And I can hold several investigations at once, so I have all the resources I need."

.w.

Rouge was walking away from Victoria's house slowly, looking at the ground below her feet absent-mindedly. It was chilly outside, so she was wrapping herself tightly in her jacket. The meeting still was an a few hours, but she didn't think she would fall asleep when she got home.

Then she flinched and stopped altogether, as if waking up in mid-step. Her hand shot up to her neck, confirmed the lack of the chain with the bag, and Rouge gasped.

Her first urge was to storm back and recover the blue diamond, but the agent managed to swallow it up. Trying to change anything now would be outright stupid.

She resumed walking, struggling to figure out what the heck was wrong with her.

The greatest treasure hunter in the world had never felt doubtful about what she was doing. All the jewels in the world were hers to take, and it all boiled down to whether she needed an adrenaline rush at the moment or not. Those who stood between her and the object of her passion, be it ancient deadly traps or the modern law, were nothing but hurdles she found so much fun in overcoming. Switching her official status from a thief to an agent hadn't really changed anything, only now she sometimes was getting jewels legally as her fee.

But then she returned the pieces of the Master Emerald to that knucklehead Guardian. He had saved her life prior to that, sure, and in the end it was the ME that helped them stop the ARK's fall, but… her act of gratitude just didn't make sense to Rouge herself.

And next she gave the stolen diamond to Victoria Lambert, a former maid in a house Rouge had robbed. The funny part was that she didn't even feel overly sorry for her, or needed her help that much…

Only during those days, the blue brilliant was making her fingers burn whenever she touched it.

What was she hoping to hear from Victoria, anyway? That an old hag had somehow made Rouge hallucinate of white gemstones descending from the sky, in order to make her feel guilty?

Telling herself that she didn't need jewels that much in her life was equal to a mental suicide, so the bat's inner voice preferred to stay silent.

The agent looked up in the sky. It was pearly white now, covered with clouds, but in the end it would uncover the Moon again; poor, wounded Moon.

In fact, Rouge now wouldn't be too surprised to find out that all the events that had taken place in her life recently were somehow connected to it.

"Don't worry, darling," she whispered. "I will get to the bottom of it all by the end of the week."


	5. Chaos in Space

**Chapter 5: Chaos in Space.**

.w.

The conference room was on the second floor of the President's white residence. An audible noise was coming from there: before the official part began, the invitees hurried to share their ideas with everyone who was ready to listen.

Rouge wasn't heading there, though. She found an unremarkable door on the first floor that had a _Technical personnel only_ sign on it, and pressed the intercom button.

"It's agent Rouge the Bat," she said.

"Come in," came a cracked reply from the speakers. A red light above the intercom turned green, and the door slid open.

The spy complied, studying the place cautiously. The room was pretty small, illuminated by the light coming from several neon tubes and many computer screens occupying the walls. One could tell some serious monitoring was taking place by the amount of control panels gathered within every square meter of space. Save from that, there was only a simple plastic table with several chairs around and a coffee pot on top.

A couple of male technicians were operating the chaos. Rouge waved her pager in front of one of them, the one who had let her in. "What does it all mean? I got a message saying I shouldn't show up at the conference room."

The man nodded a bit awkwardly. "Looks like something is up. The G.U.N. were supposed to send their data for us to study and then present it before the ministry. Instead, they sent their people to do the presentation thing. I'd say they want negotiations. Anyway, your boss suggested you stay downstairs while they are still here. No idea why, but he said it will be best if they don't see you at all."

Unlike him, Rouge immediately realized why. The government always had their reasons to keep their agents' identities secret. Now that Rouge was snooping around the military projects, said military didn't at all have to see her at the President's place and start drawing conclusions. While her being with Eggman during the ARK incident could pose her as a random mercenary with her own aims and goals, she was expected to stay away from compromising herself any more.

"Oh my… Looks like I will have to enjoy your company for a little while." She cast a sportive smile at the man, appearing a bit lost on the outside. "But how do I learn what those guys had to show? Will I have to look through the records later?"

"Er… No need." The technician nodded at the monitors. "Those will display live video feed from the cameras installed in the conference room. If you stick around, you'll see and hear them in real time."

Rouge nodded contentedly and found herself the most comfortable chair available. Apparently, she had the permission to stay in the operator's room because the technician forgot about her immediately and returned to his colleague who had been configuring the system all this time.

"Video in three, two, one..." he announced quietly.

The monitors lit up simultaneously. As the first man said, Rouge could now see almost every corner of the conference room above them. She marked a long wooden table with chairs around it, most of which were already occupied. The bat recognized several ministers and department managers; mostly the ones responsible for space programs, science, and PR. For some reason, some bigwigs related to federal defense department were also there. The bat girl raised her eyebrows, trying to guess what brought them there.

She spotted her boss as well: an unremarkable middle-aged man sitting closer to the middle of the table. To her, the man was known as agent Rifkin, although she had her reasons to doubt this name was the real one. Despite his not-so-striking appearance, this person had enough brain and nerve to control a broad intelligence service all over the country. Rouge suspected he was behind the warning she had gotten on her way there.

The President's seat at the head of the table was empty. Apparently, the event was expected to begin at one time with his arrival.

Rouge's attention shifted onto three men located close to the presentation screen that was taking the entire wall opposing the President's chair. The insignia on the uniform left no doubts for the observers: G.U.N. people.

Summoning her social skills, Rouge tried to guess what roles they could play inside their organization. The one standing with his back to the wall, hands crossed, eyes darting across the room, was probably a part of the escorting team. Local rules required that outside people didn't bring weaponry into the place, so the guy must have been feeling awkwardly defenseless now. Thinking about it made Rouge snicker quietly.

The other two did not look like soldiers at all, though. Rouge shrugged and supposed they were from the scientific team researching the Moon problem, with the older one being a manager of sorts, and the younger and more nervous one being his subordinate.

It looked intriguing so far, but not overly shocking.

After a bit of fiddling on the technicians' part, the sound appeared as well. The bat concentrated, but couldn't hear anything intelligible in the hum.

"Is recording on already? Check the back-up channel..." the operators were mumbling in a monotone, making a sleepy bat even drowsier. Eyes half-closed, she put her arms on the plastic and rested her head on them.

Her gaze traveled up the table in the conference room. Something interesting was happening: an agent bent towards Rifkin and whispered something in his ear. The intel chief nodded and made a gesture as if going to stand up, but cut it short with a mask of annoyance.

There was a solid reason for him to stay on his place: the President has arrived.

Knowing that the usual greeting procedures were to come, the spy let her attention slip for a while. When she looked up again, one of the G.U.N. representatives, the one Rouge identified as a manager, took the floor. "As the most of you already know, the Guardian Units of Nations department in the United Federation was launching a probe into space to evaluate the damage done to the Moon, create a surface map and take samples. This department had an appropriate shuttle at its disposal, so the mission was carried out immediately."

His lower-rank colleague made a file unfold on the screen, showing a map with both the Earth and the Moon. It outlined the probe's trajectory and several time stamps.

"The probe was launched two days ago, and went into Moon orbit after an eleven-hour flight. It was programmed to turn around the far side of the Moon to explore the crater, and then send us its first data upon entering transmission zone again. At the predicted time, the probe didn't go online."

Rouge looked at the President. The tall man in a blue business suit was eyeing the speaker with his fingers entwined in front of his chin, his expression giving out no emotions. Every devoted person knew how furious he was after learning about all the-ultimate-weapon experiments carried out under the Federation's nose, and the air of mutual tension that settled between him and the local G.U.N. leaders since that. The bat could only guess how much effort it took him to appear unprepossessed all this time.

"Please, continue," the President said calmly.

"When the probe still did not appear within an hour, the problem became apparent. We called an emergency meeting to work out the solution. The G.U.N. didn't have another shuttle at its disposal, and building another one would take unacceptably much time. So our decision was to contact the Advance research satellite and request its crew to investigate."

The technician next to Rouge whistled quietly. While being more restrained in showing her emotions like this, the agent inwardly agreed with him. That Advance project created a monstrous fuss about two years ago when it was about to be started. Some suspected it was a way to place a mass destruction weapon onto the orbit, but somehow the military managed to calm the governments down. Whoever was behind the decision, they had to be awfully influential to get a satellite involved like this… and it still was a huge risk.

Another G.U.N. character cleared his throat and said, "It will be best if you just hear the conversation with the team. At 13.06 yesterday, we contacted the Advance satellite."

The map disappeared; now the screen was set to double what was said over the voice channel. A measure not entirely unwanted: the static was so persistent that sometimes it reduced the speaking to indistinguishable muttering.

Hidden speakers in the conference room came alive. "Advance, command speaking. Can you hear me?"

Rouge recognized the voice of the younger agent. The subtitles identified him as a nameless Earth operator.

"Loud and clear, command. Any news?" This man was called A-Com; someone responsible for the communications of the spacecraft, Rouge guessed.

"Looks like there is a problem with a probe sent to collect data about the Moon. We'd like to know if you could alter your course and try to locate it."

The satellite's reply came smoothly, but the subtitles indicated there was a several-minute pause: apparently, the astronaut was checking something or having a word with his crew. "Current mission is top priority, and requires that we keep our course no matter what. But we can launch a pod with our Tech piloting it. The pod has all equipment necessary to land on the Moon's surface."

"How long will it take?"

"Not much. Besides, we are approaching the Moon as well, so we'll have a glance at the scene at some point."

"Do it. We are sending you the details about the probe's course."

Another pause in the conversation. Rouge ran a finger along the base of one of her ears absent-mindedly, thinking. She wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the G.U.N. technicians edited some parts of the audio file out so that the government wouldn't learn too much… but she couldn't shake off the feeling that something about this plan was fishy.

"We've got a report from Tech," came A-Com's voice. The timestamp stated a bit more than two hours had passed since command first contacted the satellite. "The pod's sensors are picking up a weak signal from the Moon's surface– the spot is on the far side, on the crater's slope. Visual sensors show nothing. Permission to land?"

"Granted. Tell A-Tech to be extra careful."

Pause.

"How was the landing, Tech?"

"Smooth enough," a new voice came up. It looked like A-Com managed to include the tech man into the conversation with the Earth operator. "This clear spot is some distance away from the probe, so I'll have to take a hike there."

"The core might be unstable, so watch out."

"No need to remind me."

Pause.

"Whoa, it's a mess," A-Tech whistled into his mike. Through the static, it sounded like a loud hiss.

"Can you send us the image?"

"No mobile video devices with me, so no. But the probe is a goner. It's here deep in the dust, and it seems that all the insides are fried."

"Is there any way to fix it?" The operator sounded a bit desperate by now, as if the loss of the probe could be declared his personal fault.

"Don't think so. It's a mass of useless metal. Could have been an EMP, but where could it appear from?"

Pause. Rouge could imagine the state of held-back panic the command had entered by that time, trying to figure out the way out of their predicament.

"Return to the pod," the operator finally said. "Do you have enough power to circle Moon?"

"I've got several Chaos Drives with me, so sure. But my craft's sensors aren't designed to make such surface scans."

"Better than nothing…"

Pause.

"Take-off in ten, nine…"

"Tech, wait," said a new person. From the subtitles Rouge learned it was some A-Nav: probably the third member of the Advance crew, and their captain. "The pod's sensors indicate your weight increased by 136 grams. Did you take something from the surface?"

"Take-off aborted… Yes, I did. A small rock," the explorer said, sounding maybe just a bit annoyed at the delay. "Command sent the probe to get samples, so I took one for them."

Pause.

"The probe had secure containers for this purpose on board," said the operator after a short consultation with someone else present at the command center. "Unfortunately, without them, taking something would be too dangerous. A-Tech, you will have to leave it behind."

"Done."

Rouge quirked one eyebrow. Looking at the time interval, she wouldn't have thought the man could throw the stone out so quickly.

A-Nav's opinion matched hers. "Sensors show the same. Tech, it's not a good time for jokes."

"It's not here anymore…"

The operator intervened. "I hope at least the pod's cockpit has a camera or something."

"Not inside of it. Tech, hurry up. Get rid of whatever you've got with you and take off, there is still work for you."

"Roger. Hey, now that the Moon is broken, the scenery looks really creepy…"

Pause.

"I cut Tech out, so he can't hear us now," said A-Com. "I don't know why, but I don't like it. He never acts like this during missions."

"But it looks like he still has that damn rock with him," growled A-Nav. "When he returns, it's a long quarantine for him for a start."

"Speaking of quarantine," said the operator. "Now that the Moon's core is exposed, the radiation around it must have increased drastically. Could it be connected to Tech's antics?"

"Nonsense. Radiation doesn't make you lose you mind, nor does it knock satellites off the orbit…"

"Just look at this," A-Com suddenly said. "Looks like Tech is heading straight back."

Something clicked.

"Tech, you should return into Moon orbit. Your task is to gather data about the crater."

Pause.

"Tech, it's too early to go back. Do you copy that?"

"Don't tell me the link is down because of the radiation," moaned the operator.

"I'm turning the station," A-Nav said in a tense voice. "Will have video in a few minutes. Hold on…"

A whisper ran across the room on the second floor when the right part of the screen came alive. Now it showed the same black, only dotted with images of distant stars. Drifting towards the center of the starry space was the Earth's only natural satellite. The Advance spacecraft positioned itself so it could take a shot of the far side of the Moon: a grey semi-shattered orb with reddish orange still glowing deep within it.

Among the black, a tiny sparkle was pulsing rapidly; A-Tech's approaching pod.

Suddenly, the static increased, and then Tech's voice reached the audience. "…back. Didn't know I would be so glad to leave that place."

"Tech!? What happened?"

"What do you mean?"

"Connection disappeared for a few minutes..."

"Was that after you told me to go back?" the engineer asked awkwardly.

"Nobody told you to go back!" snapped A-Nav. "You were told to carry on with the probe's mission. Is it so hard to understand?"

"Calm down, Nav. I told you I don't have the needed equipment. Plus, I don't at all feel like flying back there…"

Pause.

"Go back and do what A-Nav told you," said the command center operator coldly. No matter how bad the situation looked, he sure was beyond turning back now.

The pod that had already reached the size of a barley grain began its maneuver, losing speed even despite the pilot's complaints. Despite her natural attitude, Rouge did not approve lack of discipline during the most crucial parts of her missions; anyway, she couldn't disagree less with the notion about the spacescape being dreadful.

Something made her look at the Moon at this point, and her pupils went wide. She could have sworn every other person in the building repeated her actions; some woman among the ministry shrieked.

Rouge's ears darted back and lay almost flat against her skull. Partially to block the shouting out, partially because she couldn't hold back her body's instinctive reaction on seeing something she couldn't explain. _Something_ was moving on the screen – far away, against the reddish orb of the crater. The resolution did not allow her to make out most details; all she could see was an octopus-like being struggling to tear through layers of dust and stone. Semi-transparent, with red and purple flashing deep within, it could be a tumor quickly growing inside the ravaged Moon.

Space is always silent, and not a single sound came from the creature. But the crew's screams were making up for it.

"Hey, the Moon..!"

"Holy–"

"What's _that_!?"

A-Com realized it before anyone else did. "Tech, get out of there! _Now_!"

Too late. A single tentacle extended; Rouge didn't know the distance, but she could bet it was several hundred kilometers. The glowing purple was now evident against the black as the offshoot wrapped itself around the pod, stopping its flight.

"Um…" said A-Tech.

The being was now struggling to stay upright, and failing at it. Something weakened it: its lower parts were dissipating, turning into a jelly-like mass. With one last convulsion, it drew the space pod close to the remnants of its body.

"It's not going to…" the operator said perplexedly.

It threw the pod at the satellite.

A-Com shouted at A-Nav to maneuver. The captain couldn't find the idea any more sensible, but the time was plying against the massive spacecraft. Whatever it was, the jelly being put all its strength into the throw, giving the piece of metal velocity outmatching that of the satellite.

During some last seconds, Rouge could make out the details of the space pod's appearance. It was a silvery candle-shaped object with a porthole on one end and engines on another. Since the pod was spinning wildly, those turned into one dark blurry line.

After that, the right part of the screen went black.

The older G.U.N. agent cleared his throat. "At 16.40 yesterday, all of our radars lost the Advance satellite."

The conference room exploded.

Both technicians by her side were arguing heatedly about something that seemed the least interesting to Rouge at the moment. She covered her ears to help her thoughts come together.

The thought that had been bugging her during the presentation was finally in her hands. The way the operator was talking to the crew was wrong from the very beginning. Someone from the command center wouldn't ask if the satellite could alter the course; they would know the answer was 'no' from the start. They wouldn't have to ask about the Advance's position. They wouldn't… but they had, and what could that mean?

Commanding the satellite was a privilege no local G.U.N. department could use on a whim. Long-time gathering of various permissions awaited it, and it still couldn't be sure the answer wouldn't be a no. But if someone was going to pay dearly for losing the organization's only probe… if that someone could put on the cloak of the international command center's team, knowing the channel's properties and being sure the Advance crew wouldn't ask them to verify their identity because no outsider could use the secure channel anyway… would they actually do it?

If the answer was a yes, whoever had produced that bright idea to make the satellite meddle was now royally screwed. She doubted it was the manager she saw today, though; probably someone of the bigger bosses who was too desperate to appear in front of the public after the failure.

…No wonder that the spy's last-night little advance into the military network went unnoticed.

Rouge shook her head violently. All those trouble the G.U.N. had found to their own harm did not really matter now. What did matter was the soul of the Moon, now awakened and very, _very_ displeased.

Those things Pickle had used to believe in– how much of it was actually true? It would take effort to find out…

Amazingly how nobody noticed a spaceship exploding in the sky, she thought vaguely.

Her pager vibrated, and she snatched it instinctively. "3d study, now," she read.

…The room was on the first floor in the left wing of the building. Rouge had to narrow her eyes when entering it: after a badly alight box-room, light streaming from several chandeliers seemed blinding.

A vast desk with a wooden chair next to it was the first thing she saw upon opening her eyes properly. A man was standing across the table in front of a huge window, his back turned towards the door. It didn't stop Rouge from recognizing him, anyway. "Evening, sir," she greeted her boss. "Impressive show, huh?"

Rifkin turned to look at her, his face expressionless. "Want to know why they came in person instead of just sending a couple of files?"

"Surprise me."

"They want to fire the Eclipse Cannon at the Moon to destroy whatever is left of it, along with… the beast. You know that the colony, originally the federal property, had been abandoned for years, and then closed for everyone after the incident a week ago. Now the G.U.N. want the President to let them use it."

The spy made a grimace of internal suffering. "That's not a decision you make without doing some research first. What if the cannon does not kill it?"

"Or what if there is nothing to kill at all?" Rifkin said calmly.

"Wha?" Rouge blinked in confusion, then smirked knowingly. "Want to test my attention, don't you? We both saw how the satellite was destroyed."

"We saw a video, and video or sound are easy to fake. And make the quality outstanding if they believe the venture pays off. You know what Gerald's weapon is capable of."

She sighed and shrugged, pretending she wasn't really bothered by the perspectives. "Well, all I know is that you will need a true professional to get to the bottom of this. Maybe… someone who already can tell you more about G.U.N.'s secrets than anyone else," she gave him a charming smile. More a habit than anything else: Rifkin did not appear someone who could fall to her charms.

"That's not exactly what I was thinking about." He sat into the chair and drummed his fingers on the table's surface while eyeing his subordinate thoughtfully. "What is your final pay for carrying off your last investigation, again?" he finally asked.

"A jewel of my choice." The President himself made that promise, and Rouge wouldn't miss her chance to make him fulfill it.

"Like the one that disappeared six days ago, or something bigger?"

"Huh?" The spy gave her boss a blank look. That one was the second during this conversation, so she was beginning to feel really stupid by then.

"An influential person was robbed last week. The thief took away a safe with important papers, and a diamond. The papers were found later– unlike the gem."

Rouge made a very believable show of disapproval. "I know it's always sad when jewels go missing, sir, but I think I could be of more use _not_ investigating a regular theft. Especially now, with monsters literally falling from the sky. There are the police for business like that."

Her boss nodded with content. "Good play, girl. If I didn't know otherwise, I would believe you didn't take anything."

"Sir…"

The door behind her opened, letting two human agents in. Rouge did not know them in person, but one look was enough to tell those bouncers with several holsters on their belts weren't there because of their outstanding intelligence. The bat tensed, looking back at her chief.

It didn't take being a genius to realize that the whole scenario was one huge provocation. A trained bat could easily handle two men, even her boss, and fly out the window that was so conveniently there… but what next? Giving herself away like this, she could say goodbye to safe living for a really long while, and she wasn't ready to do so right at the moment.

She pouted like a kid who was denied a candy. "Sir, I am hurt. Your mistrust is like a knife to my heart. Don't you know I gave up all bad habits I might have had before our first encounter?"

"A thief always remains a thief," Rifkin said indifferently. "One can be useful if motivated carefully, I admit. But when a thief starts visiting the homes of important people, putting at stake the outcome of another operation, it's time to take action. My people will tell who else have suffered from your addictions after they finish the searching. See, no matter what the President thinks of you, I can't let such an unreliable agent work under my command."

Rouge paled a little. He couldn't be serious about it…

"I've sent my people to your place before the conference began," the human confirmed her frights. "Now, if you please, we will go there together and look at what they have found so far."

She felt two heavy palms lay on her bare shoulders; both guards were standing right behind her now.

_A moment of truth, huh?_ The bat exhaled, trying to slow down her racing heart. Breaking away now, she would set the whole Federation after her. Playing along would mean losing too much time she could have spent searching for ways to rid the world of the Moon's wrath…

Rouge smiled, and held her hands forward. "Go easy on the handcuffs, will you?" she said.


	6. Melancholy

**Chapter 6: Melancholy.**

.w.

The ceiling was a dull sight, but Tails studied all tiny cracks and prominences on it until dusk hid them from his look.

He then rolled onto his stomach on his bed and closed his eyes. He did not feel like turning the lights on, and as the night was approaching, it was getting darker in his bedroom. By this time, most of the tools and gadget details scattered all over the floor and furniture were already clad in shadows.

Tails wished so badly that Sonic stayed at his place tonight... but the hero had disappeared like a gust of wind he was. His little brother couldn't really blame him.

The fox himself felt too heavy to force himself to move. He hadn't had dinner, so his stomach was now audibly grumbling at him. But making sandwiches meant going to the kitchen to slice some food, and Tails was feeling _just a bit_ nervous around knives lately.

Neither he wanted to wander out of his workshop. It was by now painfully obvious how many people read and believed the newspapers. He wasn't declared guilty yet, so nobody around him could openly blame him… but they were _looking_.

When he saved Station Square from Eggman's missile, people were looking at him, too. But those looks were so much different.

Pickle's body was long gone, but the kit could clearly see the image of it lying on the floor in his workshop whenever he closed his eyes. Smashing robots and launching Eggman into the sky was one thing; seeing someone's blood was a brand new experience Tails really wished he could have avoided. He refused the help of the police psychologist… he only wanted Sonic to support him a little.

Of course, demanding too much attention did seem egoistic. Sonic was a world-known hero, and he simply couldn't stay on one spot while places and people were still suffering from random meteorite strikes. Plus, during his most paranoiac moments, the fox believed his brother was angry at him at the bottom of his soul. Now that Tails was suspected to be a murderer, Sonic had even less chances of vindicating himself of the theft he hadn't committed…

Not that Sonic showed any signs of it, of course. He tried to cheer the fortuneless prodigy as best as he could, and even volunteered to gather several ex-Moon meteorite shards for Tails to study. But even he couldn't stay at the workshop forever.

Someone knocked on the front door, and Tails froze.

_Last time it happened…_

He could pretend he wasn't there; that was one straw of a thought he immediately clutched. The lights were off, he wasn't making any sounds in the last… many hours. Whoever was at his front door now, they would realize nobody was home, and just go away. Even police. Chaos, didn't he want to see police right now…

The knocking repeated, sending Tails' pumping heart into his throat.

Slowly, soundlessly, he exited his room and crossed the dark corridor to approach the window. If he leaned close to the glass, he would see the front steps on his right, as well as the ones disturbing him… His ears flattened against his skull for maximum concealment as he peeked down.

Nobody was there.

Air exited his lungs as he made a step back, relaxing slowly. Whoever decided to bother him, they were gone already. Everything was alright.

The knocking repeated, and Tails barely stifled a yelp.

_You're hallucinating_, said one part of his mind. You'd barely slept since the night Pickle had died, and now you are hearing things. _You are in danger._ _Just run_, whispered another part. Crazy as it may sound, the second option sounded the most reasonable to him at the moment.

His Tornado was in the hangar below him, and there was no way he could start it without alerting whoever – or whatever – was hanging around his front door. Besides that, just the idea of being alone during the flight hurt like a thorn in the eye. What he needed now was having people around him.

If he could open the window on the opposite end of the passage soundlessly, he would have a chance to sneak out onto the balcony, then down onto the back yard and down the hill, to the train station…

...The last train heading to Station Square was half-empty, so Tails managed to find himself a seat somewhere. Squeezed between a sleeping man and a chatty lady, he felt the terror slowly releasing its grasp on his insides. Here, surrounded by light and people, he felt nothing bad could happen to him.

A couple of teenagers in front of him were casting occasional looks at him, whispering something into one another's ears. He pretended he hadn't noticed them at all.

…Some time later, he stood alone somewhere in a corner of a huge station, not really knowing what to do next. People were streaming by, promising to soon leave him absolutely alone in the building.

Amy, Tails suddenly remembered. She had offered him an overnight stay somewhen. That seemed to be an eternity ago... He wondered if he could still recall where her place was.

It took him some time to get to the block he was looking for. Getting up to the third floor, Tails immediately spotted a door with a doorbell button placed noticeably lower than the rest. Without thinking much about time and good manners, he rang.

After several minutes of awkward waiting, he rang again and got the same reaction: nothing.

The third ringing summoned an angry neighbor. "What do you need here?" she snapped at him.

"I'm sorry." It was true; Tails only now realized that someone might have been going to sleep at this time, and the noise he created wasn't a heavenly gift for them. "I'm looking for Amy Rose. Maybe you know where she is?"

The woman's features softened. "That sweet hedgehog girl?"

"Yes."

"Oh, but I don't know," she shook her head sorrowfully. "I haven't seen her for a while, although we usually talk a bit almost every evening. I last saw her… let's see… a week or so ago? I started to think something happened to her."

She apologized and disappeared into her flat, leaving a very confused Tails behind. It seemed like Amy had never returned home after the last battle against Eggman, after their long flight home… But where could she go?

Feeling even gloomier that before, he went down the stairs and down the streets. The encounter made him sober up a bit. He saw how hurrying to leave his workshop, he had taken only enough money to buy a one-way train ticket. Now he couldn't afford a room in a hotel or whatever other options a stranger in the city could think of. But he did not want to fly back at all…

Maybe he could sleep on a bench in some quiet place. He knew some night vandals existed in the world, but it wasn't like they could be worse than the ghost hunting his place.

Tails tried to find the alley leading to the City Hall, got lost a little and found himself in the square in front of the train station, again. He stared at the lights of the Twinkle Park, listening to the music and laughter coming from there. It left him confused beyond possible; how could people be happy when someone had died only three days ago?

It was too wrong… right?

He stood there with his muzzle against the glass wall running around the park, until a security guard noticed him. "Hey, you. Are you going to get inside?"

"Um, no… Sorry, I was just going by."

It was when somebody grasped his elbow tightly. "It's a joke, of course," said a high-pitched voice by his side. "We're going in. Cute couples still can get in free, right?"

The security eyed them suspiciously. Perhaps he remembered a news flash and huge newspaper headlines telling how someone got killed in a certain fox's workshop. A stiffened Tails gave him a crooked smile, not trying to think of the girl who was now partially lying on him.

"Go in," said the man in the end.

Once inside, Tails freed his arm and turned back, eyes wide. "_Amy_!? What are you doing _here_?"

The pink hedgehog stepped back, dusting her red dress off. "It's my favorite park, silly. I like it here, so why should I be somewhere else?"

Her two-tailed shook his head. If someone was bound to be reasonable in a situation like this, it had to be him. "No… I mean, I've been to your place, and that lady said she hadn't seen you for days… What happened? Where have you been all this time?"

"Oh… really?" Amy blinked at him in a way she would do when Tails tried to enlighten her on microprocessors or magnetic fields. She looked around, confused a bit. "I think I was here all the time… Ha-ha, silly me. Didn't at all notice time go by. Why are _you_ here, by the way?"

Tails thought of what had happened to him lately. Pickle's suicide, the interrogations, people's looks on him. Sonic's reputation that was now even more stained. If Amy didn't know about all of that already, did she really need to learn about it now?

"I, um… I thought I needed some rest from my work, that's all," he said quietly.

"Then you came to the right place!" Amy clapped her hands excitedly. "Let's go, I'll show you my favorite roller-coasters!"

"Amy, wait..!"

No use. Pulling a desperate Tails to follow her, the girl disappeared into the cheering crowd.

.w.

Downtown Westopolis by no means was going to fall asleep. On one street, firefighters were digging through the debris left of an antique shop after the most recent meteorite strike; the shop's owner was by their side, weeping quietly from the thought of his belongings being lost forever. On the next street, people were already gathering to go on with the dancing and singing and drinking various liquids they would never touch in the daylight.

What were they celebrating? The Earth's salvation, or maybe just approaching weekend? Nobody could tell.

Sonic wasn't up to asking them, though. At the moment he was glued to the TV screen flashing inside a storefront, showing breaking news.

"The government and the military tried to conceal… our reporter managed to find out the truth, risking his job and even his life…"

The hero's eyes widened as the screen showed the close-up of a broken Moon. What was going on on its surface reminded him so painfully of his recent battle against Perfect Chaos…

His eyes shot up automatically, peering into the Moon intently. Right now, it looked innocent enough… but that was a weak consolation.

Some boy was watching the same TV by Sonic's side. He tugged the hedgehog by his arm. "Hey, mister. Does it mean we all will die?"

The hero gulped. "Huh, no. Bet they're announcing a new film, that's all. Looks cool, huh?"

"Lousy computer models," the boy said with the air of a seasoned professional. "I knew it wasn't real from the very beginning."

He went away, leaving Sonic alone.

…One supersonic hike later, the hero was knocking on the door of his brother's workshop. "Tails, it's Sonic! You won't believe what I have to tell ya!"

No answer.

"Hey, Tails? Let me in!"

No answer.

The hedgehog stepped back, puzzled. Tails couldn't just have gone for a walk with the night looming over the world, right?

A thought about Eggman entered his mind, but he turned it down quickly. His brother would never go down without a fight, and he couldn't locate any signs of it. Besides, the doctor's robots themselves were never the civil kind, and had they happened to pay a visit, he would have instantly guessed it by the ravaged scenery.

Sonic felt a pang of guilt as he remembered the somber Tails was in when the hedgehog decided to leave him alone with his thoughts for a while. Probably that wasn't a good idea after all.

Tails might have just wanted to have some fresh air, though… Sonic remembered that his brother was allowed to wander around the Mystic Ruins, or even visit Station Square.

"Yes, I saw him tonight," a late station worker told him. "He took the last train to the city. Looked as if an army of demons was after him. I wanted to ask if he was alright, but, um, you know… Anyway, you'll have to wait till tomorrow if you want to see him: there are no more trains scheduled for today."

A supersonic hedgehog, taking a trip on a train? What a joke…

A bit of thinking later, though, he turned down the idea to just run all the way to Station Square. For what he was up to, they would most likely need a more resilient means of transport– and Tails very conveniently left the Tornado behind.

…He landed on the beach in front of the hotel. Sonic didn't know much about the way it transformed into the walking modification, nor was he any good at driving it, so the only natural decision was to leave the plane behind and carry on on his two feet. But once he buried his sneakers into the wet sand, his next problem arose: where could Tails have gone to?

No foxes were occupying any hotel rooms tonight.

A random street officer hadn't seen any, either.

Finally, one station worker confessed she had seen a small fox leave the station, and go into the park some time later. Sonic exhaled with relief. Whatever strange forces had brought his brother into the Twinkle Park, he would have plenty of chance to ask about the later. Now, his destiny lay behind the shining glass doors with an elevator on the other side… and a sudden obstacle on his way.

"Hey, you. The entrance fee is five dollars."

Taken aback, Sonic met the stern look of the entrance guard. "Wha?"

"Five dollars," the man repeated. "Pay or leave now."

The hero patted his head quills, knowing very well that he didn't have any human money with him. Now, where was Amy when you needed her the most… "Um… will golden rings do?"

His opponent's expression of stubbornness turned into that of disgust. "You stole a diamond last week, and you still haven't turned it into normal money? Pathetic. Go away, or I'll call the police."

Fuming on the inside, Sonic turned and darted away, leaving the security in a thick cloud of dust. Pathetic! He had saved the world so many times, and it took one bloody conspiracy to make the world turn away from him!

Anyway, he still had to find the way inside the Twinkle Park somehow…

Making sure the man couldn't see him anymore, he approached the square from the other side and eyed it thoughtfully. He couldn't locate any back doors or something from his spot… But there was one nice business center – a skyscraper looming over the park.

Running at full speed, Sonic jumped and found himself on the building's wall. Hoping that his escapade won't wake up too many people, he made his way up to the top, balanced for a moment, and jumped into the park's hall one crazy sprint down later.

A small crowd that had gathered around the building's bottom now applauded, looking at him. Sonic smirked briefly, but his smile disappeared as quickly as it found its way onto his features.

"Hey, have you seen a fox around here? You know, Tails?"

A girl pointed at a store full of plush dolls, making the hero facepalm.

He tried to look down from a high spire atop a carousel, but his eyes soon hurt from the brightness and all possible colors kaleidoscoping before his vision. In the end, he found himself making his way through the crowd, studying everyone he was passing.

"Make way… let me go, will ya? Hey, watch ou–"

Too late. The person he had run into lost their balance and fell into the pool that was so conveniently there, in the middle of the park.

Sonic cringed. Water had never been his friend, and the thought of having to soak himself now was unbearable. But since it was his fault anyway, he could at least lend the poor fella a hand – he was swimming up on his own anyway.

"Pfffr… cough, cough… Hey, that wasn't very nice of– hi, Sonic."

"_Tails_!"

Relieved beyond belief, the hedgehog pulled his soaking brother into a tight hug. Tails returned it awkwardly, obviously not entirely understanding the big idea behind the action unraveling around him.

"Hey, I've been looking for you," the hero said when he finally moved back. "What's up with running from home like this?"

"Um… I needed some fresh air, yes?"

"Huh… fine, don't tell if you don't wanna. But I need your help now, little buddy. Seen the news today?"

"No…"

By then, Sonic was tearing through the crowd again, pulling the stumbling fox along. "Well, duh, see if many people will notice it with everyone being crazy like this. Anyway, looks like the Moon story is far from over yet… Ah, damn it, I can't just go past that guy like this… Think you can fly us out of here, Tails?"

He looked at his two-tailed brother. Soaked to the skin and trembling from chilliness, with eyes sunken from several insomniac nights, the fox looked as if he was about to faint.

"Whoa. I guess not." The hero sighed and took a better grip on the kit's wrist. "Hold on, here's a short ride for us."

…As he put Tails down on the beach next to the Tornado, he grasped his shoulders and looked into the blue eyes that were glittering slightly in the moonshine. "Tails, I know it's hard for you, but I really could use your help now. Try to remember what that Pickle guy told ya."

The fox twitched. Professor Pickle definitely wasn't something he wanted to revive in his mind. "Ugh… can't we just fly home?"

"Not now. Look, the G.U.N. have found something weird on the Moon… something like Chaos, but bigger, and… listen, Pickle was telling you something about the Moon, right?"

"Yeah." Tails concentrated on the conversation; it was painfully obvious it took a lot of effort on his part. "Something about the Moon having a soul– wait, it was Earth. Moon was just broken. And he said he left all his files at the University. It's in Spagonia. Then he–" He didn't have to continue.

Sonic nodded with satisfaction. "So if we need to find out more, we have to go there. Let's do it!"

The hedgehog let go of Tails to jump onto the plane's wing, and the fox leant to the metal for support. His head was spinning, both from sleep deprivation and the information he had to take in during the evening. Hallucinations first, Amy next, Sonic with Moon monsters after her…

Amy… Tails thought he remembered them sitting together in a coaster's cabin, with him clutching the hand-rail desperately and her laughing in a careless manner. She was chatting a lot, arguing with him about something, chirping about lights and her favorite fireworks…

He couldn't remember when he had lost her.

Now that the night embraced him again after the blinding lights of Twinkle Park, imagining monsters was just too easy. They were growing from sand grains to the size of the planet, stepping closer to him, purring hungrily, and he felt way too heavy to fly away…

"Hey…" Sonic leaned down, looking at him worriedly. "I can pilot the Tornado instead of you, but you will have to take the wing. Think you can take it?"

"Um…" Monsters stepped back, so the fox could focus on the green eyes above him. "I installed auto-pilot, so it's fine…" At this point he remembered something that made him frown. "But I'm not allowed to leave Station Square and the Mystic Ruins until the investigation is over."

Sonic cursed quietly; he had totally forgotten about that by then. He mused over the problem a bit. "If Eggman kidnapped you from Station Square, would it count as you breaking the rules?"

"Don't think so…"

"Then let's say _I_ kidnapped you. Some criminal I am, huh? Come on!"

His brother chuckled against his will. Using Sonic's hand for support, he managed to get into the pilot's seat.

Monsters purred and waved them good-bye as the plane took off.


	7. Off The Leash

**Chapter 7: Off the Leash.**

.w.

By the end of the day, Rouge had all of Pickle's publications printed out and scattered all over her place.

Looking through them methodically, she could see he had carried out a lot of research before stating his main hypothesis. Given that few scientists agreed to take him seriously, most of it had to be the product of his own mind.

The agent ended up looking at a dark photo depicting an ancient mural.

Pickle seemed to be good at many fields of study at the same time: history, archeology, astronomy… but not languages. That was one thing that prevented him from making the picture whole.

Now, to make all the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle come together, she had to do only two things. Talk to Miles Prower to find out if the police were scrupulous enough in their interrogations; visit a certain place in Tylia personally.

But first of all, she had to get rid of the bracelet.

To her delight, the most unpleasant part of the incident didn't last too long. Of course, her boss' people had not found any traces of the blue diamond at her apartment. It looked like her whim to give the gem out wasn't as crazy as she thought it to be at first.

Rouge's glee was short-lived, though. Obviously irritated by such a preposterous failure, Rifkin nevertheless managed to stay calm on the outside. "You will remain here. Your mission involving Project: Shadow is now on hold. And take this."

The bat caught a piece of plastic he tossed her. "What is this? Looks too cheap to wear on public."

"It's a voice communicator. New model. Chances are, we will need reliable ways of contacting you in person, and very soon."

She shrugged, and clicked it closed on her left wrist.

It was after their departure when she realized that taking the thing off at her will was far from being as easy as putting it on.

Whoever had designed the gadget was well aware of an average anthropomorph's constitution, and knew how their paws widened below the wrist. Now, it was impossible for Rouge to pull it off without some sort of key. She knocked it several times to make sure the plastic was reinforced enough to withstand any pressure put on it with the bones still staying whole.

No physical keyholes were in sight, so she could suppose the key was of the electronic kind. And she knew those were harder to force open.

Rouge mused over it. As far as she could tell, the order to stay on her spot wasn't supported with actual surveillance. Knowing her personality, Rifkin could easily guess she wouldn't stay home for long. Then why would he need a device that would stay with her no matter where she decided to go?

To place a tracker there. Let Rouge herself lead them to her hypothetical jewel piggy banks lying outside her immediate reach. It was just natural for a thief to worry about her goods' safety, right?

"Do they think I'm an amateur?" she muttered, taking a barely audible tone just in case the com was transmitting her voice as well.

The annoying part was that her _tools of the craft_ couldn't be found anywhere now that she needed them the most. Seized as possible evidence, huh? What had they expected to find at a spy's place anyway – a collection of china dolls? Her favorite liquefier guised as a nail polished remained on its place in a spare clutch bag, though, but the bat really-really didn't feel like trying it on the com with the latter still being in contact with her wrist.

Seemed that she was bound to move from her place earlier than she expected. Not that an agent could hide from their chiefs for long, but the thought of random crowds bursting into her bedroom was unnerving.

What she needed now was a consolation, and there was only one thing that could bring her some. Rouge got up from her bed; ignoring the safe below her dresser, she pressed a hidden button on her dresser's under side. The action made a part of the wall beside her slide aside, revealing a square of bulletproof glass with shelves behind it.

She had never been a fan of safes when it came to protecting her own goods. Being a thief herself, she knew the one below the dresser would be targeted first in case of a robbery attempt, and she kept a bunch of fake gems there just in case. Besides, a safe couldn't provide her with a proper view when she needed it.

Rouge got down to the floor, looking at the glass with affection in her eyes. The most of her beloved collection was there, glimmering shyly at her in response. Several prominent gems she had managed to nick before getting caught by Rifkin's agents; she was allowed to keep them as a payment for her cooperation. The ones she got as her fee afterwards; the smallest bundle. Those she had found among the ancient ruins as a lawful treasure hunter. Finally, the ones that had disappeared from people's safes after she became a part-time spy.

The latter two bundles meant the most problems for her. Laws demanded that discovered treasure was handed to the authorities, and just everyone seemed to frown at thefts. She had spent quite some time before discovering a guy who could provide her with trustworthy papers claiming those jewels were bought rightfully at private auctions. Total sum written into them implied a huge pile of money; but hey, she was only a part-time agent. Was she not allowed to have some other job on the side?

Her boss nearly tore the papers apart when he saw them. Good luck trying to prove them fake, Rouge thought.

She folded her arms behind her head and leaned against the side of her bed, musing idly. Why was she so fond of jewels anyway? All of them belonged to her ever since she was born. But if she always kept her catch secret from the world, who she was proving her right to? Herself alone?

What she knew for sure was that working as a spy couldn't always grant her that exciting feeling of adrenaline rush, and going on a roller coaster after work to get an imitation of that was just too pitiful.

Being a spy provided her with enough headache instead. Despite being sudden and troublesome at such an unsuitable moment, the latest occasion was something to be expected. While she was useful, she was stuck in the role of a thief who was allowed to breathe the air of freedom for a little longer. If she at some point turned useless or too dangerous, she would end up in prison – if she was lucky enough. Government intel had always been ruled by people who valued effectiveness, not morals.

Rouge remembered she was checking if there was a way to quickly join G.U.N. for a cover in case things turned really bad. She could only hope her boss didn't know about it yet.

The com let out a beep, making Rouge raise her eyebrows. Her dismissal had happened about a day and a half ago; whatever Rifkin's people were doing, they sure weren't in a hurry. She pressed the response button. "Rouge the Bat here, enjoying her sweet days off," she chimed.

She heard her boss' unemotional voice. "You are now allowed to go out. And you should carry on with your Project: Shadow investigation. But keep the communicator."

Rouge's eyebrows rose even more. "Nice. Any reasons behind such magnanimity?"

"We found the thief," the man said after a short pause.

"Not a moment too early, huh?"

Her remark went ignored. "She was a maid at the robbed house. She was questioned and searched when the incident occurred, but nothing was found. And then she gave herself up, bringing the diamond to her employer. Her story was that she just found it somewhere in the park, but, of course, no one believed her."

"I see." Rouge was thinking rapidly, looking for a way to learn more while trying to appear uninterested. "Now don't tell me she will become my companion soon. Knowing the way you work…"

"She won't become anyone's companion now." The bat could swear she heard her boss smile. It was scarier than him showing no emotions at all. "She hanged herself in prison yesterday in the evening, after the formal part was over and she was decided guilty."

"She–" Rouge gasped. "Yesterday!? You mean I've spent a whole day doing nothing while you already knew I wasn't the thief!?"

"We had to make sure it was not a mistake. You have my official apology now."

The bat forced her voice to turn calm again. "I would like your apologies to have a more polished shape, sir," she said. "And weight at least ten carats."

The man terminated the link.

"Greedy bastard..."

She laid back on her bed, her thoughts turning into a mess momentarily. How in the world did Victoria know..? Rouge was more than sure she hadn't given herself away during their conversation, so the woman had to have some striking intuition when she was alive. She guessed the gem she had gotten was the exact thing her former employer had lost, and preferred to return it rather than leave the country with it…

Unless the whole action was a mere play staged by Rifkin himself to make Rouge lower her guard down… but no, that sounded too improbable to be true.

The spy frowned at the ceiling. She didn't feel too sorry for Victoria: if the woman was stupid enough to ruin her life like this, it was by no means Rouge the Bat's fault. What troubled her was the fact that before her death, Victoria indeed knew who the real thief was… Had she told anybody during the interrogation? Was Rouge herself in danger now?

In more danger a spy normally finds herself in, she added to herself, and smirked. Whatever the answer was, now she had some time, and she was about to use it effectively.

Rifkin made the com stay with her, probably hoping to make her give away the goods she had stolen even if the first trap had failed. The agent couldn't care less anyway: where she was going, she didn't have any caches her boss didn't have to learn about.

But first, she had to replace the tools she had lost after the searching.

Ready to show how confident a bat could be, Rouge established the connection herself. "Hello again," she murmured to her bracelet. "Now that I'm back to work, I could use some equipment. A plane will do fine, for a start."

.w.

…A small jet designed for an anthropomorphic pilot landed on the sandy beach near Station Square. Rouge was falling behind on the intel, but the latest one she had got claimed there was another plane somewhere around her. It looked like the fox boy decided to have a little stroll on the night streets.

She cursed furiously several minutes later when she made it to the hotel and found nothing but a circle of charred sand. Now she had to start her chase all over again…

Her next thought was more calming, though. If Tails was brash enough to break the clear order he was given, then she could with a lot of certainty tell where he had gone.

A loud thumping caught her attention, and Rouge raised her head. Someone was standing not far away from her, on the tiles surrounding the hotel's pool, surrounded by thin light streaming from the hotel hall. Being good at seeing in the dark, the bat recognized the pink hedgehog who was following Sonic and his friends all the time, and even remembered her name: Amy Rose. At the moment she was stomping her feet furiously, looking at the same spot that caught Rouge's attention.

"No, no!" she was crying desperately. "Stupid, stupid, stupid! Why did he have to go? He's still too…" her speech turned into wordless whimpering at this point.

Now that was a good opportunity to catch up on the news, Rouge thought. "Hey," she called out loud.

The girl fell silent, peering into the night intently. With Rouge standing in the thick shadow cast by the hotel's walls, it wasn't easy to make out her features. "Um… hello?" said Amy. "Tails, is this you?"

"No. But I'm looking for him. He was there, right?"

Pause. For some reason, the hedgehog didn't hurry to reply, musing over something instead.

"Hey," she said at last. "I know who you are. You are that bat who was sticking around Eggman and Shadow, right?"

Rouge mentally moaned. What she needed the least now was a girly hysterics, or a lection on morals. "Does it matter so much? I am looking for Tails, or Sonic. Someone of them was here tonight."

Amy tensed visibly. "Why would a thief like you need Sonic? Hey, I can't see you. Come here."

"Don't you know it's impolite not to answer a question?" Rouge hissed. Now she was regretting giving out her presence in the first place; she should have known the girl wasn't adequate enough to just give her the information she needed. "If you have nothing to say, don't waste my time. I already can say they went to Spagonia."

The hedgehog made a tiny step towards her, hesitating before entering the engulfing darkness. "How do you know that Sonic was here, and where he went? Are you spying on us?"

"Forget it…"

Rouge stepped back, and turned to leave. She didn't believe the girl had the guts to follow her. There was a long flight ahead of the agent, and she couldn't waste time on babysitting.

She realized how wrong she was when something hit her on the back of her head hard, making her lose her balance and slide over the sand on her stomach.

The spy was back to her feet in a blink, wincing at the pain between her ears. Looking back, she found a huge mallet lying on the sand next to her feet, and Amy breathing heavily several feet away.

"Look," Amy said in a sheepish voice. "I didn't mean to hurt you, but I think you should go with me. You act really weirdly."

Rouge bent slowly, and picked up the mallet. "Let's see how tough you are without your toy," she said calmly, and hit the handle against her knee.

Next moment, an expression of genuine surprise spilled into her features as the hammer disappeared from her fingers a second before the impact, appearing in Amy's hands again. The hedgehog girl thrust it into the sand and jumped. The action sent her flying high above Rouge's head, and let her land between the spy and the path leading to the jet.

"Huh." The spy cringed; she hated it when amateurs tried to act like seasoned fighters. "Go on a diet. Maybe you'll learn to fly when you are fit enough."

She hit the sand hard, sending a thick wave of it flying at Amy's face. The girl could see little in the darkness before that, and sand in her eyes was bound to make her totally blind and helpless. Rouge spread her wings and darted into the sky.

This time, she actually noticed the mallet fly at her, but its speed was too high to evade the impact fully. Rouge screamed as fragile bones in her left wing cracked, deadly hurt by such treatment. Keeping in the air was impossible for her now; with a growl of incompliance, the bat dropped like a stone on the other side of the pool.

Dusting the sand off her everything, clutching her mallet again, Amy made it to her fallen opponent. She leaned over the spread body, genuine worry in her eyes. "Oh, no. I didn't hurt you, did I? Look, I live really close, I could–"

Rouge wasn't up to listening to the full story. Supporting herself with her elbows, she raised the lower half of her body, and kicked the nauseous girl in the chin.

Kicking was something she was unbelievably good at. Something in Amy's neck snapped; mallet dropped from her weakened fingers. She made an awkward step back, lost her balance, and tumbled into the pool.

The agent rose slowly, trying not to disturb her damaged wing. Even if the bones were going to heal in the future, she could say goodbye to flying for a really long while. Because of that alone she didn't regret any second of what she had done.

But Amy was in the water now… The dark silhouette had settled on the bottom of the pool, swaying slowly. A tough anthropomorph could in theory survive a neck breakage, but not drowning.

Rouge was looking down, biting her lips fiercely. Hearing about Victoria's death was fine; she didn't feel responsible in the first place, so no guilt was prickling her. This time was different, and her actions could actually lead to someone's death.

She was a thief, a spy, a double agent, a foul person overall… but she was not a murderess.

But saving someone who had attacked her– please. She wasn't a copy of that knucklehead, was she?

In the end, there was something weird about Amy's behavior. Weird to the point she had to think twice every time she needed to touch a person acting like this. All of that was in Pickle's conspectus already…

The hedgehog smiled at her from below the surface.

A gasp escaped Rouge's lips as she jerked back. Feral fear became the weightiest argument in her inner battle; going around the pool in a wide arc, she ran towards her jet as fast as she could.

Maybe she would regret this decision later, but it was her life what mattered the most to her at the point.


	8. Foreigner

**Chapter 8: Foreigner.**

.w.

Several hours of flight did magic to Tails: from a walking half-corpse he nearly turned into his usual smiling self. The shadows below his eyes hadn't disappeared, though; but given that they were about to enter the temple of hardcore science, they couldn't look any less convenient.

It was day when they crossed Tylia's border; different time zones were playing their trick.

Finding the University was easy. Harder was finding a landing spot. Tails suspected that just dropping down in the middle of the campus was sort of rude; plus, Tylia was not used to random heroes flying above it, so local authorities could interpret their appearance in a wrong way. In the end, he landed beyond the city border line and had Sonic take him to the University by foot. They didn't have to be afraid of losing direction: the main building was prominent enough to be seen from afar.

"Piece of cake," said Sonic, skidding to a stop.

His brother was not as optimistic. Looking over a tall and vast structure, he frowned. "We still have to get inside. Normally, you have to be a student, or have a special permission to enter a university this significant. Plus, everything in Pickle's studies might be under seizure since the incident."

The hedgehog sulked. "Don't tell me we'll have to play students..."

"Maybe we could get inside through the window or something," Tails suggested uncertainly.

They didn't have to. Once inside and having informed the security of the purpose of their visit, the duo watched a bulky and very gentle man call down someone from the stuff who instantly told them to follow him inside.

"I'm Professor Pickle's assistant," said the guy who looked more like a student, with his disheveled hair, shabby clothes and lost look. "Um, I mean I was. We all were shocked when it happened... Professor has told me you two would come soon, and that I should let you study his documents. They are here; if there is anything else I can help you with, just tell me."

He left them alone at Pickle's former study. Tails looked around with that sort of awe one feels when visiting a cemetery. It was very tidy around them; either Pickle was a very accurate person, or his assistant had found some time to put everything in order. Books on the shelves; papers on the long wooden table; everything being neat and ready to meet long-awaited guests.

There was a teapot on the table as well. The fox looked inside only to see that it was empty.

He landed on the couch next to the table, lit the floor lamp and took the first batch of paper tentatively. Many of them were plain lectures on history Pickle must have been reading to his students. It took Tails some searching to net what he finally found interesting.

_"…Professor Harley finally agreed to meet me at the University of Westopolis. Now that his theory has gotten several new confirmations, I as well can feel more confident about my own hypothesis. Professor Harley still appeared skeptical about it when I was leaving, but I promised to make him the first person to know when I get more proof as well._

_His theory covering the Moon's origins brought several more jig-saw puzzle pieces into the theory I'm currently working on. Making it more complicated in the first place…"_

"Hey, found anything interesting yet?" Sonic asked loudly above his ear.

"Looks like. Wait a minute, I need to read some more…" murmured Tails, changing papers.

_"…The giant impact theory states the Moon was formed when a foreign space body collided with the Earth, forcing its mantle and core to part. Said body could probably be around the size of Mars, and it was called Theia by Professor Harley himself in his publications. The fact that we can live on our planet is the result of a wonderful process that restored the planet to its normal shape, despite now it is actually made up of two different bodies."_

_"…Not implying to give up my belief that the Earth has a soul sleeping deep its core, I would really love to imagine how it could possibly react on such an interaction. Was it ultimately enraged? Or maybe, on the contrary, there was something about that impact that made its slumber much more peaceful? Sources state Gaia is an enemy of all forms of life, and any presence of it on our planet's surface is something that stuns me the most at this point. I am ready to believe that Theia was that made Gaia's rage powerless."_

_"…I re-visited the ancient temple near Spagonia to refresh the pictures I took the last time. The meaning of the murals found there could hardly be interpreted differently. There was a point in the planet's history when the matter of the Earth itself broke apart, setting the fire at its core free. I estimate the date as two to three thousand years ago. Ancient echidna tribes, one of the most influential societies of that time who spread all over the world earlier than the humanity did, witnessed it themselves and called it the wrath of Gaia, the god of the earth. I took that name from that part of their messages I managed to decipher, and find it curious how that name correlates with 'Theia', the name of an ancient human god and the space object that led to the Moon coming to be._

_Unlike my dear colleagues, I do not dare suppose those pictures are but a product of an ancient artist's imagination. Latest incident involving a deity named Chaos proves that echidnas were quite careful in outlining the events that were taking place around them._

_But how did the echidnas managed to survive the catastrophe? Why do we still see the Earth as a whole? The murals in the temple are scarce, and it seems I will never get additional funds to find more temples that are scattered, and lost all over the world."_

_"…One of many sources of my worries now is the Moon. According to Professor Harley's theory, it was made from the Earth's mantle and core that were thrown into space after the impact. It became stable over time, with mantle surrounding the core to copy the structure of any planet._

_But what about Gaia? Given that the Moon has a part of it, I can assume that now the Moon has a soul of its own. A crippled, damaged, and probably utterly devastating soul."_

_"…I do not dare think what could happen if the Moon's surface was damaged at some point. The ancient echidna murals depict people losing their minds after coming in contact with the planet's soul. It is not easy to tell what brought the most devastation back then: the breakage of the planet's crust, or the chaos that began after it. Even if the Moon's soul is many times weaker, it is still capable of bringing more destruction than the mankind can handle._

_The idea I had lately was that the Moon was the reason why the Earth tore apart thousands years ago. If Gaia feels incomplete, it must fight hard to get its missing fragments back. And if this idea proves correct, it will only mean that the story is far from being over yet…"_

Tails looked up as Sonic started shaking his shoulder again. "Well?" was the impatient hero's question.

His little brother told him briefly about what he had learned from the papers, and the hedgehog scratched his ear thoughtfully. "So, there's one huge deity sleeping below us, and a small part of it raging in space above us. Nice. But y'know, I really hoped the prof would know how to stop them."

The fox looked at the papers again. "If I take it right, that… Gaia was already stopped in the past. We know that both humans and echidnas survived the planet breaking apart. But the murals Professor Pickle has found in a temple don't state how restoration of the planet became possible."

"Are there any photos of those murals here?"

They found those rather quickly. On a dark background of the insides of an ancient temple, there was a patchwork of bright stones on the wall, looking very much like the one Sonic had seen in the Mystic Ruins while chasing after Chaos. The mural depicted several blue pieces separated from each other by something dark.

"If Pickle could decipher that somehow," said Sonic, "then he sure was one smart guy."

"He wrote there could be more temples." Tails was thinking quickly. "If we find those, we should learn how to stop Gaia and restore the Moon."

"Sounds like a job for Knuckles. He's into the echidna stuff. Let's pay him a visit!"

"Wait." The kit started digging through the papers furiously. "We don't even know what we should look for. What do those temples look like on the outside, for a start?"

There weren't any exterior photos, and he sighed. "Looks like we'll have to visit that temple near Spagonia to learn more details. Well, I think that looking at the murals ourselves won't hurt, too."

"Great! Now, let's go. The sooner we start, the sooner the world is saved!"

But they had to wait with their flight for a little more as another impediment occurred on their way.

"Hey!" Sonic shouted as they made it to the spot where they had left the Tornado. "It's our plane! What do you want from it?"

A small figure jumped off one of the wings, and Sonic gasped. "_You_!?"

"Pleasure to see you, too," said Rouge the Bat in a coarse voice.

"Can't say so myself." Sonic frowned, looking at the spy suspiciously. "What are you doing here? Don't tell me you being here is a coincidence."

Instead of entering the argument, Tails preferred to study the bat silently. She looked utterly horrible: with her clothes being torn in several places, wearing deep shadows below her eyes instead of her normal make-up, Rouge nearly matched Tails in semblance with a zombie. Plus, the boy couldn't help noticing how weird one of her wings looked. Was it broken?

The latter freaked him out the most. What could have possibly happened that a miserable Rouge would resort to them so far away from their home country?

Rouge herself didn't feel overly delightful about how it all turned out, either. Running out of fuel for her jet somewhere above the ocean would have been much more disastrous than doing so near Spagonia, but now she had to look for different means of getting to the temple as quickly as possible.

A mean worker at a small airdrome she had landed on refused to refuel her aircraft immediately, and the bat knew she was in no shape to try and charm or intimidate the guy. Flying was out of question, as was walking all the way to her destiny. But before she could start running around in search for a taxi, the worker caught her attention again.

"There's another unplanned plane over there," he said lazily. "Two anthros on board. You know, if you have a private talk with them, maybe you'll get yourself a seat."

Rouge gritted her teeth, but fought an urge to speak out what she was thinking about the offer. Her anger vanished into thin air anyway as she recognized the plane sited on the next lane; the Tornado. Which meant that she had finally caught up with Tails.

Deciding that the fox went to see Pickle's former study or apartment, she preferred to wait for him on the spot so she wouldn't miss him in a big city. Staying on place meant less stress for her wing… but it as well allowed certain unbidden thoughts to step up.

While the auto-pilot was leading the jet towards Tylia over the ocean, Rouge took her time to fix her wing as best as she could, take the painkillers she found in the jet's first-aid kit, and remove her smeared make-up. Such monotonous work let her shoo away the irrational image of Amy's body smiling at her from under the water, and brought back the ability to think logically again. The latter immediately offered her a very unpleasant revelation.

The pink hedgehog's death– if she was now dead in the first place– was bound to become the news of the day. If Rouge was right about a tracker being in her com, then the agency would have no problem outlining her last night's route– including a visit to the beach where Amy's lifeless body was found. For someone like Rifkin, putting those two facts together and drawing a conclusion was a child's play.

In this case, Rouge was going to have serious trouble explaining how her actions were a mere self-defense… at least unless she managed to get to a certain temple before coming in contact with the President's agents.

The nastiest part of it was that Rouge couldn't know for sure what exactly her boss had already found out. The jet's radio remained silent, as did her com no matter what numbers she dialed. The agent took it as a very bag sign. Her delirious imagination was ready to picture an ambush waiting for her at the airdrome, at the very first hospital she'd visit in hope to fix her wing…

She clutched her head desperately. For a reason completely unknown to her, her own head had turned into her greatest enemy in the last few days.

No surprise that in the end she was even happy to see a familiar duo approaching the plane, even if it meant a very tough conversation was about to follow.

The bat licked her dry lips, and said, "I could really use a lift now."

Sonic shrugged, not at all perturbed by her look. "Sorry, but nah. We're sorta in a hurry here."

"Let me guess: you're going to this place." She showed them a dark photo, on which Sonic recognized the mural he had seen back at Pickle's study.

"Wha..? How did you get this?"

"I'm an agent," Rouge sure wasn't up to coquetting today. "It's my job to know stuff. Now my job is to learn what else is inside of that temple; but, you see, I can't go there myself."

Tails was deep in doubt by that time. On the one hand, Rouge seemed to be in too much trouble already to endure their refusal, and the most sympathetic part of Tails' soul was willing to help out. On the other hand… helping a spy could mean to trouble for them at best.

Sonic seemed to be experiencing the same problem. "Why should we help you? You're a thief."

Rouge licked her lips again, and played her trump card. "You won't be able to read the texts without me."

"What texts? There are only murals there. You know, pictures."

"No." She produced the photo again and pointed at the very corner of it. "See? Those squiggles around the mural aren't just an ornament. Pickle hasn't even took a full photo of them, not knowing those were actually writings. It's an ancient language, probably the one used by the echidnas. Treasure hunters all over the world modified it and now use as their secret language. I'm a treasure hunter, so I can read it. You can't."

"Maybe Knuckles could read it, too…" Tails said uncertainly.

"Perhaps. But Knuckles is half of the globe away, and I'm right here and ready to cooperate. Your choice?"

The heroes exchanged glances. Sonic shrugged, and Tails nodded towards the plane. "Sorry, but the Tornado has only one seat, and that's for the pilot. You will have to take the wing."

"Deal."

Rouge jumped on the blue metal, wincing slightly. The hedgehog took another wing, pretending not to notice her suffering, or never noticing it for real. Feeling more than uneasy himself, Tails got into his pilot's cabin.

It was about sunset time when the Tornado rose into the sky.


	9. Puritan

**Chapter 9: Puritan.**

.w.

The flight promised to be a short one, compared to the journey across the ocean, so Tails preferred not to turn the auto-pilot on and steer the plane himself. He was trembling slightly from the evening chill and Rouge's presence by his side, but it all ended as soon as he took hold of the Tornado's controls. The engines roared; this familiar sound turned out to be all what was needed for Tails to calm down.

Minutes later, the Tornado had gained the needed altitude and was heading towards the northern part of Tylia where the temple was sited. The pilot's gaze was shifting onto Rouge on his left all the time, and it took some effort to concentrate on something else – controls, windshield, his watch, random screwdriver on the cabin's floor next to his feet…

In the end, his wandering gaze stopped on the horizon before him. With an hour or so of the flight lying ahead, he could think over what he had learned in the University of Spagonia.

Sonic on the plane's right wing was doing pretty much the same. Only unlike his two-tailed brother, he couldn't stay quiet for long when deep in thought. "Hey, Rouge," he shouted to the bat sitting on the other wing. "You didn't tell us how you got that photo."

The spy wasn't up to supporting the small talk. Clutching the metal with both hands, she was fighting the wind blowing into her face. Their current speed was much higher than the one she normally gained during her flights, and such a difference in velocity was unnerving. The fact that her wings were useless in case some accident chose to happen so many feet above the earth didn't help her mood in the slightest. "Secret archives. Let's just say I have access to them."

No matter the circumstances, her reputation couldn't allow her to say something like _'I just found it on the Internet_.'

"Fine." Sonic fell silent, but not for long. "Anything else you saw there?"

"Hm… First tell me what you found out in Spagonia. You've been to the University, right?"

Sonic retold her what he'd learnt from Tails, making Rouge wince at the loose talk. "Well, at least you know about Gaia," she said.

"Yup. Only I've no idea why the prof made so much fuss out of it. I mean, yeah, that thing on the Moon doesn't look pretty, and it seems to have trashed a satellite already, but it's not like it can make it to our planet."

The agent remembered how the private information had already made it to the journalists, and frowned. Either some of them managed to sneak to the conference, or someone of the officials had sold the news to them; anyway, now the world-wide panic was doomed to make things much more difficult for every party.

"It can." Rouge seemed happy about being able to _comfort_ Sonic like this. "If you saw that TV report, you know the piece of Gaia in the Moon isn't whole. It's like, um, assembled from many shards. Every shard can exist on its own and even travel down to the Earth's surface, on its own or with the Moon's splinters. Professor Pickle hadn't seen the video, but he could guess something like this from the paintings he found inside the temple."

"He wrote that the echidnas were losing their minds when Gaia touched them…" Sonic frowned as his imagination outlined the perspectives.

"Yes. Haven't noticed any strange behavior lately?"

"Well, not really, I–" At this point, Sonic's eyes went wide. "Pickle! He killed himself all of a sudden!"

Rouge nodded. "And it's worse than that. I looked up the investigation logs. Before his suicide, he was talking about people who can't stop celebrating for weeks. It looks pretty unusual now that you think of it, huh?"

"But…" the hero gasped. "It means a lot of people have already come in contact with Gaia! We've got to find a way to stop it!"

"Well, all I know is that Pickle himself didn't know about such a way," the bat huddled up at the chill the night had brought. "He guessed that a shard can reproduce if it has possessed someone, but he has never found a way to force it out of the body it possessed. In one of his latest articles, he suggested finding people who haven't been _infected_, and evacuating them to the ARK. His idea was that you could always steer the colony so it would stay away from the Moon with its piece of Gaia. But, um, it just so happened that it's unlikely the government would allow anyone to go there."

"Bad idea," Sonic frowned at her. "What about those who'd have to stay on Earth? You can't just let them all die!"

Rouge shrugged. "That's why we're going to the temple. Pickle hasn't even taken enough photos to depict all the writings around his precious murals, so I couldn't– hey, fox boy, steer up. It's too early to land."

At this time, Sonic as well felt how the plane was losing altitude quickly. Looking back at the pilot's seat, he saw that the fox didn't move to follow the bat's suggestion.

"Hey, Tails!" he shouted in case the kit hadn't heard the previous phrase because of the noise. And then noticed how his brother's head rested on the controls motionlessly.

"Tails!"

In a blink, he was standing near the cockpit and shaking the fox furiously. "Tails, wake up! We're gonna crash!"

"Sonic, take control!" shouted Rouge. Not used to running along the wing freely, she was moving way more slowly than the blue hero.

The hedgehog tried to shake his brother's cramped fingers off the control columns. Accomplishing that, he grasped the controls only to find out they were stuck.

"Darn!"

Rouge had finally made it to the pilot's cabin. One look at the hedgehog's struggling was enough to evaluate the situation. "Take the block off! Which button does that?"

He stared at the controls desperately. Tails' experiments turned it into something that looked more like the Eggpod's control panel, with many buttons for unknown functions. Even the reckless hedgehog decided that pressing all of them randomly at a time like this wouldn't be a smart idea. "I, I don't know!"

"Do something!" Rouge shrieked. The ground was flashing some two hundred meters below.

Sonic did. He tore Tails' limp body out of the cabin, grasped it tightly, and hopped off the plane. "Jump!" was the last thing he told Rouge.

"Wha..? Wait!" The agent's eyes went wide. Sonic had never found time to pay attention to her wing's pitiful state, and now he left her to die without even knowing it. Rouge grasped the Tornado's controls in panic, saw how useless pulling them was, shut her eyes tightly and followed Sonic's example.

Seconds later, a loud crash resonated across the forests in northern Tylia.

The hedgehog didn't hear that. Just before hitting the surface, he tried to curl into a safe ball; tricky task, given that he was set on protecting Tails as well. The duo tore through the thick trees safely, but the very first impact with the ground made Sonic gasp and uncurl, sending the heroes into a very ungraceful flight down the slope.

As soon as the movement stopped, Sonic rushed to check Tails. The fox still was in one piece and didn't have visible wounds, but appeared deep unconscious. His older brother began worrying for serious now. Were it not for the temple, he would storm to the nearest hospital…

Temples made Sonic remember about Rouge as well. He was more than sure that she, being a bat and a trained mercenary, could survive on her own, but went to check her out as well just in case.

His worry gained a basis when he heard moans coming from the other side of the slope. Said moans helped the hero find the bat in the dark forest quickly. Spread on the ground, she was clutching her wing, sniffing uncontrollably.

"What's wrong?" Sonic put Tails down and kneeled beside the bat.

A kick in the face was the answer he got.

"Umf!" His flight stopped as his back hit a tree trunk. "Hey, what was that for!?"

"For leaving me alone in a falling plane!" came a furious hiss from the darkness. "Didn't you know my wing was broken!?"

"Wha..?" Sonic stared at a ghostly white silhouette on the forest floor. "Why didn't you tell me?"

The bat didn't reply. Memories of frantic flapping in the night sky, searing pain in her left wing, and falling through the branches were still burning in her mind, and she was craving to make somebody feel just as hurt as she was.

It was when Rouge finally noticed Tails. She slowly got to her feet, ready to demonstrate wrath of the magnitude that would put Gaia to shame.

"Don't touch him!" Sonic was back to his feet as well. "It wasn't his fault."

"He fell asleep. He knew he was piloting the plane, and fell asleep. He didn't even turn the auto-pilot on! And now you say it's not his fault?!" her voice, dangerously calm at first, turned into a yell by the end of the speech.

One part of Sonic noted how Rouge was basically right, but the other, bigger part of him refused to accuse his brother of anything. "Tails hasn't slept for nights. Pickle's death totally wrecked him, and you can't blame him for that. Besides, we're still fine, right?"

"Yes. Only we've lost the plane and the course," Rouge said harshly, chilling down a little. Burning fury didn't go anywhere, but the cooler part of her brain was telling her that she would find a better time for a better revenge later, after being over with their expedition.

"Um… Well…" Sonic scratched his ear. The bat was right once again. And even if Sonic himself could travel pretty fast without any planes, Tails was the only one who knew where they were heading. "Huh, no biggie. I'll take you to the nearest town, the doctors will fix your wing and Tails, and we'll return here tomorrow. And we'll find the Tornado on the way back."

Several feet away from him, Rouge took off a small rucksack Sonic only now noticed she had. "Nonsense. I remember the map of this area; we'll sooner find the temple than a town here. Plus, we're too close to go back."

"Huh. I'd look at you trying to find anything in this darkness."

"Don't forget that I'm bat, hedgehog."

"Oh!" Sonic's eyes widened. "Does it mean you can see in the dark?"

"It means that I'm smart enough to prepare."

The flashlight seemed intact by touch. Rouge turned it on experimentally and was greeted by a fierce surge of light. Clicking her tongue approvingly, she dove into her rucksack again.

Knowing that she'd most likely have to explore a dark temple and the forest around it, she provided herself with some of her treasure hunting equipment she managed to get back after the confiscation. Ignoring Sonic standing next to her, she drew out a bottle with painkiller pills. Those helped her concentrate after the fight with Amy while she was flying to Spagonia, and they were bound to help her think clearly now.

Two pills later, she took out a folded map. Unfolding it onto the ground, she poked her finger into a green area in its top part.

"We're here, right?" Sonic was hopping from one foot to another impatiently by her side.

"Shush. We were flying from Spagonia," poke, "to the temple," another poke. She drew a line with her nail, connecting two spots on the map. "I saw mountains in front of us short before we fell, so we should be somewhere around here. The temple is at the feet of this mountain, so, we're really close to it. See? With your speed, it will be a quick hike."

Rouge gave Sonic her flashlight so he wouldn't run into a tree at full speed. Not that he could gain it anyway, having to avoid massive trunks all the time and tugging Rouge and Tails along. When he finally made it to a clearance covered with small rocks, he could finally breathe freely again.

"Stop," commanded Rouge. As soon as she was on the ground again, she took out the map. "Almost there. A bit further and up the slope, and we should see it."

They nearly missed the entrance anyway. Sonic, still more worried about Tails he had to carry rather than about ancient temples, was waving the flashlight so carelessly it was a miracle Rouge could notice anything in the jumping spot of light.

"Wait, wait! What was it?"

The hedgehog pointed the flashlight at the spot again, and the two of them noticed several massive stones, all squared evenly, placed one onto another to form a gate of sorts. Sonic remembered the temple he had seen in the Mystic Ruins; with its stairs, patchworks, and snake statues, the latter looked much more civil.

"Going in?" he asked quietly.

"Wait." Rouge took the flashlight and stepped close to the stones, looking at them intently. Standing by her side, the hero finally noticed that the stone was covered by barely noticeable symbols Rouge had so aptly called squiggles earlier.

"Can you read them?" he asked.

"Most of them are worn down, so I can't make out whole words. But the letters look familiar. Let's go inside and hope the writings there are in a better state."

The hero soon regretted bringing back the memories about stairs. Inside was plenty of them: wide and tall stairs made of something that looked like pinkish marble, partially crushed and turned into dust, leading downwards. Rouge was going ahead with the flashlight, and the spot of light was frequently resting on massive statues on both sides of the staircase. Sonic tried, but couldn't recognize the creatures they were supposed to portray; partially because the statues were crumbled drastically, partially because most of the animals he'd seen had less wings and an even amount of limbs.

"Weird," he said out loud.

"What's that?" asked Rouge without turning back.

"Just rememberin' another echidna temple I've seen. That one was even neat compared to this one, with water and funny traps."

"Must have been a Chaos temple," Rouge said absent-mindedly, peering into the stone attentively. "Chaos is a god of water, and Gaia is a god of earth. That's why there is no water here, and we're heading underground. Good that you know about traps, by the way: just because we are at another god's place doesn't mean we shouldn't watch out for surprises. And don't shout like this, or you'll bring the ceiling down on our heads."

He looked up. In the scarce light he noticed the amount of cracks on the stone above them; it indeed wouldn't take much to make it bury them under it.

A long period of silent descending followed, which ended when the spot of light found itself on a wider piece of stone that could hardly belong to another stair.

"Looks like it's here," whispered Rouge.

Her heart began beating faster, pumping adrenaline into her veins no matter what. Ancient treasure hunting instincts awoke in an ancient temple, sharpening her eyesight tenfold for hidden riches. She had to blink forcefully several times to make her urges back down; treasure would have to wait.

The trio found themselves in a huge cavern; probably a natural one because it was hard to believe that living creatures could create something that grand. A single ray of light was drowning in darkness, not reaching the opposite wall or the ceiling, only occasionally resting on one of many columns supporting it.

"Whoa," Sonic whistled quietly. "Looks like I'll have to have a look around this place."

"Wait." Done with the columns, Rouge was now observing the floor. It was assembled of many square tiles, colored black or purple, placed in random order. "Looks like colors of that creature on the Moon," she said. "Wanna bet which ones of them are booby-trapped?"

The hedgehog did not. "But how are we going to get to the murals?"

"Think a bit," the agent frowned. "Pickle has been to this place recently, probably not alone. If he made it further into the room, so should we."

Further observing brought pleasant news. This time, Sonic paid attention to white crosses drawn to some tiles close to the doorframe they were stuck in. "Must be the ones the prof has checked," he guessed.

"Might be. Let's go, but you better watch out. And leave your buddy here, he won't go anywhere now."

_And he won't be a burden in case we'll have to make it out quickly_, she added to herself as Sonic rested Tails' body against the wall, whispering something reassuringly into his ear.

First steps inside the room didn't instantly kill them, which made Rouge feel a bit more confident. Lowering the flashlight, she concentrated on her feelings. Maybe bats couldn't literally see in the dark, but their natural abilities allowed them to outline the shape of objects around them. Now she could feel that the room was probably half of a kilometer wide, almost just as tall in its highest spot, and had the shape of a semi-sphere. Save for columns they have already seen, there was something more massive in the middle of the room.

An altar?

Rouge frowned. Altars weren't something they needed at the moment. They needed murals, and murals tended to be on the walls.

"What do you see there?" Sonic was getting impatient.

"Nothing. Let's check out this part."

She turned to the left and approached the wall. It turned out to consist of many rectangular parts separated from each other by columns, so the room's floor was a polygon rather than a circle. Anyway, even if something had ever been on the first section they explored, it was now gone with all of the tiles.

The second section showed the god of the earth itself, or at least how ancient echidnas saw it. Rouge looked at purple tentacles and multiple eyes in most unexpected places, and thought that she really wouldn't like to meet the creature face to face. Below the picture were several symbols, probably the ones Pickle interpreted as _Gaia_.

Third section depicted several echidnas offering some animal as a sacrifice to their god. She tried to read the writings under it, but dropped it when she saw they were a mere prayer.

"Here it is!" exclaimed Sonic as soon as the light touched the next section.

Rouge herself recognized the mural a copy of which she carried in her rucksack. Looming in front of them was a huge image of a something tearing a planet apart. The mural wasn't in a good state, but it was difficult not to recognize the purple creature from the second wall, and the Earth.

"Okay," Sonic stepped back and crossed his arms in front of his chest. "Now let's see if you can read that ancient lingo."

She ignored the scepsis in his voice and raised the flashlight to have a look at the pattern.

"Interesting," the bat said after a pause.

"You have no idea what it says, huh?"

"No, it's a song. Want me to pick the rhymes, or will retelling the main point alone do?"

The hero snorted. "Very funny. Main point, please."

"It says the god has broken the planet, as we can see on the mural. The mantle tore apart, exposing the core and Gaia inside it."

"What, is that all?" the hedgehog rolled his eyes. "I'm shocked. Totally worth going here."

"Thank Pickle for deciphering it for you," it was Rouge's turn to snort. "Now, let's move on to the next one. There are only so many verses you can add to one mural."

As light fell upon the next part of the wall, Sonic frowned. Now in front of him was a scene of panic that occurred after the catastrophe. Gaia itself was floating above the ground; some echidnas were running away from it, some were for some reason stabbing the running ones, some seemed to be singing in happiness with their faces turned towards the deity.

Some of them had purple eyes.

"It says that Gaia found the murderers among the people, and touched them," Rouge said quietly. "And they killed themselves. After that, Gaia touched the thieves… and the liars… in fact, all the sinners, and made them lose their minds. They too started killing or were killed. Only the ones with pure souls were allowed to escape."

The hero looked at the dying people sympathetically. From what he had seen in Tikal's memories, the echidnas were soldiers at heart, so probably very few could flee.

"It's like a legend," Rouge noticed. "I bet Gaia started touching everyone it could reach, and the survivors later decided they were spared because they led proper lives. Let's go."

Next mural surprised Sonic: it was all white.

"Let's see…" Rouge's lips were moving silently for some time, and then she sighed. "Can't read most of it. Many letters are missing. I think it tells about some light that appeared with Gaia."

Looking at the next section gave them nothing: the picture was missing.

"I guess I know what the professor meant," Sonic said, peering into the darkness on his right. "He went round this room, but those murals were the only ones he found. What happened to the rest of them?"

"Time. Or an earthquake. This place is many thousand years old. Luckily, some writings are intact."

"Read them!"

She needed no orders to do so. "Now it is interesting. It says it was… no, something different… two Gaias? It doesn't make sense!"

"Maybe they meant the part of it that was sealed in the Moon?" Sonic tried to help her out.

"No, it says the second one appeared from the core as well… I'm confused; the writings call them both Gaia, as if it was a deity with two bodies or something. They had a battle…"

The bat rushed to the next section. "…And the one that came second won it. It fought the first part of itself to protect those forms of life that deserved to live, and won!"

Next part of the wall. "It calmed the first one down, and brought it back to the core. As both of them returned to where they slept, the planet was back to its normal shape as if nothing happened."

Next one. "The remaining echidnas gathered to build temples…" She swore and lowered the flashlight. "Guess that's all we can find here."

Rouge started walking from side to side, thinking rapidly. Sonic thought he noticed several red crosses on distant tiles in jumping light.

"Basically, it says that Gaia disappeared on its own, right? Why doesn't it go away now? It's been plenty of time for it to do so!"

"It can't," Sonic said slowly. Blinding ideas like this one were rare guests in his spiky head, and he was careful not to scare away this one. "And I think I know why."

Rouge stopped dead on her tracks, looking at him with disbelief.

"The white one wasn't Gaia," Sonic told her. "Our planet has _two_ souls inside. Tails was reading about giant-something theory–"

The agent's eyes went wide. "The giant impact hypothesis! A space object collided with the Earth and became one with it! But– but Pickle wrote that only our planet had a soul!"

"Well, he might have been wrong, huh?" Sonic waved at the temple around them. "He learned all this stuff about the planet's soul from here, and we know he couldn't read what you could."

"So," Rouge resumed her walking, "there were two souls inside the Earth after the impact. Gaia and, um, whatsitsname, Theia? Right. Theia calmed Gaia's rage down, and because of that life could appear on our planet."

"Why wasn't there any life on Theia?" Sonic asked uneasily.

"I don't know. Maybe there was, but all of them died after the impact. Doesn't matter," the bat girl shook her head annoyedly. "What does matter is the fact that Theia's soul was what put the Earth back into one piece."

"And the planet broke apart in the first place because Gaia felt incomplete," Sonic continued, infected by this wave of inspiration. "A part of it was in the Moon. We saw that at Pickle's study, too."

"Yes. And Moon appeared when a part of the Earth was thrown into space after the impact. Now that it's broken, it does what its bigger _brother_ was doing thousands of years ago."

It was when she stopped. "But…"

"Um… I'm not sure Theia's soul is up there as well," Sonic said in a cheerless tone. "I think Pickle wrote about only Earth's matter being in the Moon."

He thought about it a little more. "On the other hand, he didn't know about Theia's soul at all. And that giant theory is still in progress. I mean, a part of Theia _could_ be in the Moon! And if we find it, we can stop Gaia's shards here on Earth! Or," he slapped his forehead as another idea hit him. "Or it can be here already as well. If it has already touched someone like, like–"

"Like white diamonds in the sky," Rouge said lifelessly.

"…Whatever. So, we just need to find that person, and– Hey, what's wrong with you?"

Only now Sonic looked at his companion closely. The bat was standing motionlessly, looking into the darkness with no expression on her face that was now almost as pale as her fur.

"I saw it," she said.

"Saw what?"

"The light coming from above. The night after we saved the Earth. It looked like white diamonds…"

Sonic stared at her, perplexed beyond possible. "No way… Of all the people on this planet, it chose _you_!?"

The bat's past as a thief, her being a spy, working for Eggman, nearly killing Knuckles in a fight over the Master Emerald shards, Victoria's death, Amy's motionless body in the dark water – all of it was in that single phrase.

Those words seemed to have triggered Rouge back to life. She cast a look full of disgust at the hedgehog. "It has nothing to do with souls, you idiot! It's a legend! It could have happened to anyone!"

"Fine, fine," he muttered, stepping back a little. "It doesn't matter now. All we have to do is go back and use the power of that shard in you to neutralize Gaia's shards… ugh, no idea how that actually works. Think you can manage it?"

"No," her voice became dull again.

"What!? Hey, I know it's hard, but we've got a world to save, okay?"

The agent looked up at him, anger in her aquamarine eyes. "They were diamonds, falling from the sky! Have you ever seen that? It just doesn't happen unless it's a trap, or, or, oh, I don't know, but it can't be anything good!"

Sonic's heart sank. "You don't mean you haven't touched them..?"

"Of course I haven't!" Rouge began raising her voice again. "I just was there until they went away– I don't know where!" she hid her face in her palms.

"Fine!" the hero nearly cried to outvoice the tantrum she was throwing. Having complained about Rouge being the wrong person to carry the light in her soul moments ago, he was now feeling annoyed about her being so short-sighted. "It's fine. At least now we know Theia is here. We will go out, find it, and– agh!"

The bat removed her palms from her eyes and could barely stifle a yelp as she pointed the flashlight at a foreign silhouette behind Sonic. The hedgehog stepped forward instinctively, getting away from the pulsing pain in his back, and turned back.

"Sorry," Tails said sheepishly into his face. "But you really shouldn't shout at this place."

He was holding a small screwdriver in his hand.

The hedgehog blinked at him, reaching back to feel the sore spot. With his spine having extra thick fur and rows of steel-hard quills, a strike with a tiny screwdriver meant a mere tickle. But the surprise effect was making up for it. "Tails..? What was that all about?"

"You have left me behind," the fox said in the same gentle voice, making a step closer to his brother. "Why?"

"Sonic, step back," Rouge said sharply. "Has he been to any crowded places lately?"

"I found him at the Twinkle Park…" Sonic said, hesitating to fulfill Rouge's order. Then he gasped. "I brought him Moon meteorites! Gaia's shards travel down from the Moon with them!"

"_You touched the meteorites!?_" she shrieked, jerking back.

Tails made a swift movement, and the screwdriver hit the flashlight in her hand. The light went out, and the device itself landed meters away, torn from her fingers.

"I told you to stay quiet," came his voice from the darkness.

"Tails, don't do it! Whatever it is, fight it!" Sonic cried desperately.

Rouge pressed into a column, resorting to her bat vision alone now. If the worst had happened, she was facing _two_ infected creatures now: Sonic, who was stupid enough to touch the meteorites by himself, and Tails, who had gotten the remaining shards. She wasn't going to be fooled by the hedgehog's peaceful behavior anymore; all his actions were just a play to lure her into this trap!

Now she would do anything to break free. If only she could fly…

But she couldn't, so there had to be another way. She was positive she could beat both ex-heroes like kids with the darkness around them; but if Pickle was right about shards being able to spawn copies at touch with a non-infected creature, she had to better stay away from her opponents.

Her feeling informed her that Sonic had rushed forward, bumped into a wall and was now twisting his head wildly in an attempt to locate two other furries. Tails, on the opposite, was slowly moving straight into Rouge's direction, as if being able to see in the dark as well. The bat estimated her position, bit her lower lip, and stepped to the left.

"I'm here," she said loudly. "Come and get me."

Unlike she expected, Tails stopped immediately. Sonic, on the other hand, rushed to her voice, storming past his fox friend. Rouge waited for him to approach her, and then span around herself swiftly. A Screw Kick brought her high in the air; reaching the maximum altitude, she kicked the column on her right powerfully, bringing a storm of stone splinters onto Tails' head.

Even before the stone started its movement, Sonic below her went past the spot Rouge had been standing on, and stepped onto a tile with a red cross on it.

Something clicked.

Rouge clang close to the column, expecting an earthquake or a shower of ancient arrows. Instead, Sonic just disappeared from the _soundscape _with a yelp; her sensations then informed her of a square hole in the floor. If it had a bottom, it was too far away for Rouge to estimate the distance.

Another click came, and the hole was replaced with the tile again.

The bat dropped onto the floor. As long as she could tell, Tails was standing on the same spot, still intact, with pieces of stone lying around him.

"If you killed Sonic, you will regret doing that," he said in a stern voice. "I liked him."

Rouge moved her right heel back a little for extra support. Something clanged quietly, nearly making her heart stop. But a second later she realized that the source of the sound was not a tile with a red cross on it, but a screwdriver Tails had thrown.

She sat down slowly to pick it up. Holding the tool, she smiled daringly into the darkness. Getting out alive was all that mattered at this point.

"Come and get me," she repeated.


	10. Behind the Moon

**Chapter 10: Behind the Moon.**

.w.

Light was flickering slightly. For an unaccustomed person, it was hard enough to look at it for too long, not to mention work in it.

But the only person present in the room was accustomed to dim lights, and he could carry on with his task as if he was in a spotlit surgeon's room.

Surgery was the first thing that came to mind upon looking at the table the man was working at. A spread hedgehog's body lay on it, deep unconscious and motionless. The man was delving into his patient's innards with a cutter and, judging by the movement of his lips, was murmuring something to himself.

A wall on the man's right was full of monitors with a traditional control panel below them. Some of the screens displayed desolate metal passages. For some reason, the rest of them showed space, and the Earth from similar angles.

One lonely monitor was playing the United Federation's only channel dedicated to the most mystical and supernatural event in human history. The sound was muted.

"Surveillance reports strange human activity in Central City," came a mechanical voice from the other side of the table.

The man ignored it. A sudden idea visited him, and he threw his instrument onto the table.

"In fact, said activity is present in almost every inhabited area," continued the voice.

Its creator snorted. "Still celebrating? Pathetic. Metal, bring me some tea."

In front of him, a red oval flashed menacingly. A small blue robot was spread in vertical position above another workplace, almost completely disassembled. The belly plate was removed along with the turbine, as was the head's back plate and one eye. Thick cables were attached to its shoulders and knees, providing it with just enough energy to stay awake, observe the table and follow the intel reports. Its creator found the situation exhilarating.

The robot cast a glance at the cables, at the poles supporting him, at the implements lying below. "This unit is immobilized."

"Really?" Eggman slapped his forehead hard. "How could I forget? What a pity. If so, order some from the kitchen."

He bent down, took a screwdriver from under the table, and went back to work.

Metal Sonic took in the scenery before him. According to his creator's words, that pathetic copy below the screwdriver was Eggman's ticket to tremendous success, and Metal himself was doomed to behold its creation. In the meantime, the doctor promised to decide whether the one and only real Sonic needed the ability to use Chaos Control – something Eggman had only recently learned about.

His status was humiliating to the limit, and one part of Metal's CPU made a decision to never, ever cooperate with the creator again. A more rational part decided to try and be somewhat useful, wait for Eggman to restore the engine and power supply, and only then implement his ultimate revenge.

"Subsequent increase in death-rate: three point two per cent per day and growing."

"What!?" This one was a success: Eggman dropped the screwdriver. "Some hardcore celebrating is going on, huh? Let's see a live feed from the Earth."

He removed his goggles onto the top of his head, and it immediately became clear how he managed to see anything in the poor light: the goggles had many filters that allowed seeing in scarce light, magnifying separate parts of the picture, and many others a professional surgeon would need. The doctor rushed to the control panel. He typed in a command, and the monitors showed different scenery. Eggman watched it a little, and quirked his eyebrow. "Looks normal to me."

"You are seeing a junkyard in the vicinity of Apotos. Recommendation: switch to any city in the United Federation."

The man frowned, but did as was told. This time, his both eyebrows traveled up his forehead when he saw the madness going on in the streets. "Have those people lost their minds?"

"Unstable mental state is perfectly normal for organic creatures."

Eggman cringed. Metal was a terrible company when in a spiteful mood. Maybe giving him his eye back could help that?

Anyway, he was intrigued now, and did not need Metal Sonic anymore to start acting. A quick check showed the same scenery in Central City, Westopolis, Station Square. Meanwhile, Apotos, Spagonia and several more cities appeared rather peaceful; well, at least people weren't killing one another on the streets.

Right now, Eggman could notice only one pattern. It was night in the United Federation, and day in the other places he checked. The man drummed his fingers on the control panel, thinking.

"Show me Sonic," he ordered the computer in the end.

A quick search later, it gave out a sorrowful beep. No results.

"Maybe Tails? Or Amy Rose?"

Same story. All of his enemies seemed to have disappeared at once. He didn't even bother to look for Rouge or Knuckles: the picture was clear enough… well, at least a small part of it.

"Does Master desire to go there and investigate the situation himself?" Metal asked after a pause.

Master was thinking rapidly at this point. Something interesting was indeed going on back on the planet, and catching up on the news sure sounded tempting. On the other hand…

On the other hand, he could easily do that from his current location. Death Egg 2, even though it was still under construction, had all the means of contacting the Earth, starting from leeching off the TV channels and finishing with two-way portals for his robots. And while his labor drones were finishing with the trimming, it was better for the spacecraft to stay in the Mars' shadow under Eggman's parental control.

His second thought was about the body lying on the table, and the doctor turned back to look at it. A mechanical black hedgehog, a copy of the Ultimate Life Form, was what was bound to grant his plan a huge success. A being created by two geniuses simply could not fail… but just in case, the man had prepared to produce several dozens of those to support him. The original hedgehog slept on the lower decks of his spacecraft as well, providing Eggman with fresh research material.

If Sonic along with the world decided to go down before the epic showdown began, Eggman would make them regret it dearly.

Plus, going meant leaving the spacecraft to Metal Sonic… Eggman winced at the image and shook his head. "Computer, send the reconnaissance drones. Make sure they record all they encounter. Let them return in, say, three hours. Oh, and gather me all the news articles and TV reports that were released after my retreat. And keep looking for Sonic and his friends."

Metal's single eye stared into the back of his creator. Perhaps, it meant the beginning of his only chance to break free.

* * *

.w.

**Author's note:**

_My Light_ ends here.

Open endings are pretty, aren't they? Sometimes it's so much fun to leave the characters to solve their predicaments by themselves, and watch their struggling as a spectator, not a writer. In a way, writing the events down ruins the freedom of imagination.

Hope you enjoyed the tour.


End file.
